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.