On Christmas Day a passer-by found a meter-long shell on a riverbank in Argentina which is thought to be of a glyptodont, a prehistoric kind of giant armadillo, experts said Tuesday.
A local man thought the black scaly shell was a dinosaur egg when he saw it lying in the mud. Nievas found the shell beside a stream at their farm in Carlos Spegazzini, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the capital Buenos Aires.
“My husband went out to the car and when he came back he said, ‘Hey, I just found an egg that looks like it came from a dinosaur,”. “We all laughed because we thought it was a joke.”
“There is no doubt that it looks like a glyptodont,” said paleontologist Alejandro Kramarz, Bernadino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum.
“The animal became extinct thousands of years ago and it is very common to find their fossils in this region,” Glyptodonts are the ancestors of modern armadillos. They had big round armored shells and weighed up to a ton and lived in South America for tens of millions of years
By: Archa Dave
