Armadillo Coloring Pages
Armadillo is Spanish for "little armoured one," and it fits. These are the only mammals in the world with a shell made of bony plates, covered in the same tough stuff as your fingernails. There are about 20 kinds, from one you could hold in your hand to one longer than a baseball bat.
Jump to: About | Where They Live | What They Eat | Rolling Up | Burrows and Pups | Jumping and Swimming | Tiny | Hairy | Ancient Relatives | Cousins
Little Armoured Ones
The shell isn't one solid piece. Bands of plates across the middle slide past each other so the armadillo can bend and squeeze into tight spaces. The nine-banded armadillo is the best known, though the number of bands can vary from one animal to the next, so don't be surprised if you count eight. Underneath the armour the belly is soft and furry, which is why an armadillo tucks itself in instead of showing it off.
Where Armadillos Live
Nearly all armadillos live in Central and South America. One kind, the nine-banded, has wandered up into the southern United States and is still heading north. Texas liked it so much that it made the armadillo the state small mammal. They look for soft ground that's easy to dig, so forests, grassland, scrub and even desert all suit them.
Dinner Is Served Underground
Armadillos are insect hunters. Their eyesight is poor so a nine-banded armadillo sniffs the ground with its long nose, digs up ants, termites, beetles and grubs with its claws and slurps them up with a long sticky tongue. Fruit, eggs and the odd small lizard are fair game too. The giant armadillo takes this to the extreme. It's well over a metre long counting its tail, and it rips open termite mounds with enormous curved claws.
The Ones That Roll Up
Only the three-banded armadillos of South America can roll into a complete ball. Their head and tail plates meet like the lid on a lunchbox, leaving no gap for a hungry predator to poke a nose into. Every other armadillo has to dig in fast or run for its burrow.
Burrows, Naps and Pups
Armadillos dig burrows to sleep in and can snooze for up to 16 hours a day. Baby armadillos are called pups, and a nine-banded mother nearly always has four at once. They're identical quadruplets that grew from a single egg. The pups are born with soft, leathery shells that harden over their first few weeks, and they're up and walking within hours.
Jumpers and Swimmers
Startle an armadillo and it may leap 3 to 4 feet (about a metre) straight up in the air.
Water doesn't bother them either. An armadillo can hold its breath for several minutes and simply walk across the bottom of a stream, or gulp air to puff itself up and float across.
Tiny Armadillos
The pink fairy armadillo of Argentina is the smallest of them all, small enough to sit in your palm. It digs through sandy plains and dunes, and its shell is attached only along its back with soft, silky hair underneath.
Hairy Armadillos
Hairy armadillos are named for the coarse hairs that poke out between their bands and along the edges of the shell. They live on the grasslands and scrub of southern South America and will eat almost anything they can dig up. One kind is called the screaming hairy armadillo, because it squeals when it's picked up.
Ancient Relatives
Long ago the glyptodons roamed the Americas, and they were armadillo relatives. Some were as big as a small car, with a domed shell of hundreds of small plates fitted together like tiles. They died out roughly 10,000 years ago.
Armadillo Cousins
An armadillo's closest living cousins are anteaters and sloths. It sounds like an odd family photo, but all three belong to a group of mammals that began in South America. Scientists call them xenarthrans, which means "strange joints," because of the extra interlocking joints in their lower backbone.
Anteaters have no teeth at all, so they slurp up their dinner instead. A sticky tongue up to 2 feet long flicks in and out of an anthill again and again.
A sloth moves so slowly that algae grows in its fur, which turns it a little bit green and helps it hide among the leaves. It spends almost its whole life hanging upside down in the trees.
