Interesting, but if the blobs in the pictures are car-sized, then Argentinians are three-meters tall. The modern internet really does provide constant practice in mild disappointment.
The OP seems to be at the end of a long chain of broken telephone. The 19 February 2020 press release from the institute doing the dig doesn't say anything about cars [1]. The 21 February 2020 article in Metro [2] correctly states that glyptodonts could grow to the size of a VW Beetle, but leaves out that it's not this species of glyptodont and certainly not these specimens (it also incorrectly calls glyptodonts a genus; the specimens here are in the genus Glyptodon but the largest in the subfamily Glyptodontinae are Doedicurus clavicaudatus). The mixing up of these specimens with the largest ones makes it into the headline.
The editor is listed at the end of the article, and in an ideal world would have corrected the error by now, if not before publication. I know what role editors used to play in journalism, but I'm honestly not too sure what they do these days. Write headlines, I guess. Look for the little red squiggly lines beneath misspelled words, and occasionally stir themselves to correct them. And someone has to press 'publish' on the CMS, might as well be them.
I'm even less sure whether the traditional fact checking role still exists; it doesn't seem to!
The CAFE standards that incentivized today's massive cars are actually relatively recent - the original standards were enacted in 1975 AD. Twenty thousand years ago, this was a perfectly normal size for a car.
You might want to check those pictures. They’re barely bigger than the people squatting next to them. Cars have gotten a lot bigger but they were never THAT small.
Perhaps not car-sized but car-massed? Cars have lots of internal voids, like the passenger compartments. Most land animals not. A VW beetle weights about 800kg, IIRC. An animal with similar weight probably has smaller total volume.
Or are you saying Argentina is really wild, and they have extra tiny cars and extra tall people? Like some sort of clown land?
Bit rough on the Argentinians.
More seriously - how does such a crap clickbait article filled with actual mistakes get all those upvotes? Do the hackers of hackernews merely "smash the like button" based on titles? Uh-oh!
If that is a car-sized rock, then the person seems to be much larger than the car. In fact, it seems that if they laid down next to it, they'd be longer than the car-sized rock!
Given a car is probably >2 meters, and < 5 meters, that person must be even larger!
Wouldn't it be _hilarious_ if, years from now, it was proven that the reason for LLMs hallucinating was because they were mimicking the reality of what they were trained on. We could have had accurate AI all along!
If Argentinians are three meters tall, then their cars must be even bigger than normal cars. So these armadillos are even bigger than car size... probs the size of a small truck!
Fun fact, people thought giants (patagones) lived in our land, hence the Patagonia name. I blame Thor personally for their eradication, otherwise we may have been 3m tall.
Good question. Given they were found in a dried riverbed, my guess is they were caught in a flash flood. The armour made them move slowly and they couldn't run fast enough.
If they were caught in a flash flood the odds of all of them ending up together seems very low just from my experiences with flash floods in the Sonoran desert. Flash floods are VERY violent and will take 2-4 ton vehicles and throw them about like a tiger playing with a mouse. Those remains don't look like they weight that much so I would think some other, less violent, event led to them all expiring near one another at the same time.
Flash flood is the modern species. They were splash floods back then, until dash floods emerged, leading to the modern variety as speed increased even more.
As the flood dissipates downstream particles will fall out of suspension and/or wash ashore. They're all the same shape and density so the conditions in which they drop out is going to be about equal. If they were all swept up from the same starting point they could very well all end up washing up in the same place. It's made more likely if the river has something like a natural lake for the flood to dissipate into. The dead stuff is free to float about and get naturally sorted by the wind and mild currents.
Not sure that's how it works. I think the river/streams while changing it's course exposes the fossils.
I've never found an entire glyptodon but I have a couple of pieces of the shells that I found while fishing in small streams. There's one stream in which you almost always find some piece.
I'm sure in that same stream there must be some entire shells because some of the plates I found aren't eroded at all, which indicates that it didn't move much from where the rest of the shell is.
> Not sure that's how it works. I think the river/streams while changing it's course exposes the fossils.
That gives me another hypothesis, about how they died together. Some of those critters dug burrows, we still find those today[1]. It's likely sometimes those burrows caved in, entombing its inhabitants. Perhaps they were sheltering in their burrow, and died together when it caved. Then their remains spent thousands of years undisturbed underground, until the river changed course, exposing them.
> I've never found an entire glyptodon but I have a couple of pieces of the shells that I found while fishing in small streams.
Giant sloths had these bone plates under their skins as well (both sloths and armadillos belong to the order Xenarthra[2], together with anteaters), some were even found with evidence of being used as pendants by paleoindians[3].
Maybe they had freeways and Chevy Suburbans like in Texas.
But an interesting thing I've read is that armadillos breed in identical multiplets for some reason, so they may all have been babies of a single brood.
