Argentinian farmer finds family of 20k-year-old armadillos | Hacker News Reader

Argentinian farmer finds family of 20k-year-old armadillos

allthatsinteresting.com

158 pointsthunderbong70 comments

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.

1. https://www.conicet.gov.ar/hallan-cuatro-gliptodontes-en-la-...

2. https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/21/ancient-armadillo-size-car-di...

> The mixing up of these specimens with the largest ones makes it into the headline.

Where were the editors in all of this? Did no one person look at both the headline and the photo?

> Where were the editors in all of this?

Their salaries were redirected to google's ad network employees.

The editors had OKRs that had key results driven by money metrics. What did you expect the result would be?

Good point. How could one possibly notice this if you have to ever consider money? It's impossible.

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!

I think it’s - “Write catchy headlines and get more page-views” now.

So the real title of the article was "Argentinian Farmer Finds Family of 20k-Year-Old Car-Sized Armadillos Purple Monkey Dishwasher"

In a few minutes of searching I couldn't find any report in English that doesn't have this error.

This says everything we need to know about how centralized the media is. There is zero diversity. A single source drowns out competition

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.

How do you even know how big or small cars were 20k years ago?

And how big were hominoids 20k years ago?

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.

I think you mean three deci-metres tall?

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!

No, GP was right in the comparison:

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!

3m is the minimum integer meters to satisfy that.

Unless I'm missing a ninja edit in GP?

Ahhh I get it. Hah. No I think you're reading correctly and I was imagining the opposite, like they have tiny cars, so they must be tiny.

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!

The good ol' "Make a mistake so that everyone talks about it"

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!

A bit funny but in all honesty they don't specify what kind of car that is. Maybe they meant cart and the t got lost along the way in the noise.

They have pretty small cars in Argentina...

The car is perhaps a Citroën Ami.

It's hot-wheels car sized.

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.

Original news is from 2020 https://iipg.conicet.gov.ar/hallan-cuatro-gliptodontes-en-la...

Autotranslation for the lazy https://iipg-conicet-gov-ar.translate.goog/hallan-cuatro-gli...

In the photo of 2020 thet have more dirt arround them. Probably they were discovered ib 2020 and there is an update from 2024.

Considering that the only comment on the piece is four years old as well, this looks like a repost from that time.

Ah, the imperial CAR standard of 1999 - before we switched to the imperial SUV standard. Metric shall never win! Joke aside? DNA? Reconstructable?

Those are definitely not car-sized (but they're still pretty big)

maybe they were thinking of those?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_microcars

You're obviously not a clown then!

Hard to believe an armadillo could live that long, let alone an entire family of them.

Let alone ones that are the size of 20k-year-old cars.

We don't have the same appreciation of what's a "Car Size" object.

As in "fits into the car". There are also truck-sized armadillos and it takes paleontologists on Silverados to deal with one

It's a large car the size of a small car.

apart from novelty cars... I've never seen a car that small before.

20k-year-old cars were smaller than the ones we are accustomed to today.

Argentinians prefer very small cars

Milei deflation

How did they die together like that?

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.

20k years ago the flash floods were less evolved and hence were much slower than the modern newfangled flash floods you're talking about.

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.

Are these all AI generated jokes?

Nah, just out-of-practice, work-from-home dad jokes (at least GP, which was mine)

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.

There's further evidence for flash flood (or mudslide?) though: IIRC, they need to be buried very quickly and thoroughly for fossilization.

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].

[1] https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/shelter-for-giants/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenarthra

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41520020

Didn't know about the sloths but osteoderms from glyptodons are quite different.

Maybe it was like Alaskan mudflats and the animals got stuck or sucked in. If that's the case, maybe it's possible they didn't die together.

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.

So I read that as: 20,000 1-year-old car sized Armadillos and I wondered how you breed so many and where did they find room.

Giant armadillos with thagomizers! Terrifying!

:-D True, but imagine how proud Thag Simmons would be...

Regardless of the hyperbole in the title, it's an interesting find. I wonder where they were going and what happened to them.

What did they eat? Rat sized termites?

the article says they are herbivores

Motorcycle sized at most

can we stop with replacing the 000 with k, it’s rather annoying

It's a pretty common convention, at least it's used a lot in my domains of interest. What do you not like about it?

I mean pretty much every domain really. In what field do you not replace them? Knitting?

No.

Hot take: let's start using ka instead of either, at least when talking about thousands of years.

Man imagine the size of the ant colonies it fed on

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