The depictions of the glyptodonts, as well as fossils, certainly look like huge armadillos, but now a team of scientists has used DNA evidence to show that they weren't merely an example of convergent evolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution), but are directly related to modern armadillos.
"Extinct glyptodonts really were gigantic armadillos, ancient DNA shows" |
Phys.Org (http://phys.org/news/2016-02-extinct-glyptodonts-gigantic-armadillos-ancient.html)
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Illustration of glyptodonts. Image Credit: Peter Schouten
QuoteIf you could travel back in time to South America thousands of years ago, you might have caught a glimpse of an animal known as a glyptodont living alongside giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. Glyptodonts looked like gigantic and fearsome armadillos; one of the largest species, Doedicurus, weighed as much as a ton and had a powerful club-shaped and spiky tail.
There's a good reason for the resemblance to armadillos, according to researchers who have reconstructed the family tree of these ancient beasts based on their mitochondrial genome, reconstructed from small fragments of DNA extracted from bits of a protective, bony carapace. The molecular evidence reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 22 confirms that gigantic armadillos are exactly what glyptodonts were.
"Glyptodonts in fact represent an extinct lineage that likely originated about 35 million years ago within the armadillo radiation," says Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Canada.
[Continues . . . (http://phys.org/news/2016-02-extinct-glyptodonts-gigantic-armadillos-ancient.html)]
Story from the BBC: "Monstrous fossils 'were armadillos', says DNA evidence" (http://www.bbc.com/news/35630712)
The full text of the paper is available from
Current Biology (http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)00121-4).