gliptodons were a large family of edentated mammales, wich are also know as giant armadillos. the glyptodon bring its name to the glyptodontidae family, in witch glyptodon are included, being one of the most importante members . the famly includes several genders wich also include many speceis. Them all had a common ancestor. their speciation process bugun in the last pliocene, they lived all the pleistocene and extingued in the endings of this period, so, the rests of these annimales are around two million years old or 10.000 years old. Anyway, some species lived during the early Holocene. As i said, there are different genders of glyptodon, in Mar de Ajó i only found fossil evidence the genders Glyptodon , Panochtus y Doedicurus. It´s important to note that finding panochtus bones is very difficult, because in years of long walks looking at the soil, i only found 4 "shield plates" of this gender.

glyptodons lived in South America, later, migrated to North Americae. it was an herbivous wich used to eat grass the whole day.

th first glyptodon finding was in 1760 by the British jesuit Thomas Falkner, in Carcarañá riverside, in Santa Fe province, Argentina. this fósil was descript years later by the French biologyst Alcides Dessalines D'Orbigny, who travelled many times to South America. In Mar de Ajó, , my first Glyptodon findings were in 1993, i dont know about previous findings in the area.

they weigh 1,5 toneladas, were 3 metres long, were covered by a great bone shield wich let them be protected of the atack of the great Cenozoic predators, like the phorusrracus (big runner birds), saber toothed cats, bears, and so on. this rigid shield was made up by cients of small tetra, penta and hexagonal bone boards as shown bellow, wich were articulated by two different kind of "sinartrosis": The armonical articulation and the denticulated articulation, wich several times used to get osificated. sometimes those articulations were not osified, because of the annimal properties, or because of the age of it. on its external side, the bone boards have a tipical drowing wich is important for the taxonamical clasiffication when I only find this bone boards

both sides of the board where cribated by many vascular holes, and into the bone you can see an important and voluminous vascular plexus.

the head and the tail was also protected by a bone shield. In many Glytodonts the tail was tubular and its end had a ball with bone pricks.

In Glyptodon gender species, tail was protectes by movil rings. Dorsal shiels was osified with vertebral column, and vertebras were fixed ones to others.

skull was small in comparison with the rest of the skeleton, it was short, and tall, under the cigomatic there was a vertical bone structure for the jaw ocluding muscules.

pieces of Gyptodon shield

Glyptodon hexagonal bone boards

the left bone shows an erosionated area, posibly because of vasculitis

PANOCHTUS