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Glyptodon
''Glyptodon'' (Greek for "grooved or carved tooth") was a large, armored mammal of the family Glyptodontidae, a relative of armadillos that lived during the Pleistocene epoch. It was roughly the same size and weight as a Volkswagen Beetle, though flatter in shape. With its rounded, bony shell and squat limbs, it superficially resembled turtles, and the much earlier dinosaurian ankylosaur, as an example of the convergent evolution of unrelated lineages into similar forms.
== Discovery ==
Although Darwin is said to have found the first glyptodonts (the family), the first mention of the genus ''Glyptodon'' in Europe was in 1823, from the first edition of Cuvier's "Ossemens Fossiles."〔 The then unnamed ''Glyptodon'' was briefly mentioned in a letter from Don Damsio Laranaga. He had found "a femur... It was about seven pounds, and maybe six or eight inches wide", as well as part of a tail.〔 At the time, the discovery was believed to have belonged to ''Megatherium'', a type of giant ground sloth. A man named Sellow found some carapace plates in three-foot deep clay in Uruguay four years later. That discovery only made the professors even more certain that the discoveries were of the ''Megatherium'', since the bones of this prehistoric giant sloth were usually found in similar conditions and Cuvier had said that the genus was loricated.〔
Although some believed that the armor resembled that of the modern armadillo, the popular opinion was the ''Megatherium'' theory. It was not until Professor E. D’Alton wrote a memoir to the Berlin Academy in 1833 comparing the extreme similarities of these mysterious fossils to that of the armadillo, that the scientific world seriously considered that the pieces of carapaces and fragments of bone could belong to some prehistoric version of ''Dasypus''. D’Alton said that “all the peculiarities of the former () may be paralleled to the latter (pieces )”〔 He concluded that the fossils belonged to some prehistoric version of an armadillo. However, since a full skeleton was not available at the time, he said that his idea was not conclusive. This uncertainty in the fossil remains continued until a man named Dr. Lund identified the remains as a new genus in his 1837 memoir.〔
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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