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238 name Armadillo. The shields, as well as the bands, are composed of numerous, many-sided plates, placed side by side like paving-stones, but without any motion among themselves, except a limited degree of pliancy during life from the thinness of the whole. The transverse bands, however, connected by the skin, allow of free motion. The under parts, as well as the limbs, are covered with a thick grained skin, roughened by hard warts or tubercles, from which arise a few bristly hairs. The joints of the back-plates are also provided with long hairs, and a considerable fringe of the same grows from beneath the lateral edges of the bucklers. The tail is either grained like the under parts, or, more generally, encased in rings, resembling the back-plates.

The Armadillos are furnished with molar teeth alone, which vary in number in the different genera, never being less than twenty-six, in the whole, and in one species even amounting to ninety-eight. They are detached, those of one jaw fitting into the interstices of the other, as in the Dolphins. They are constructed on the same model as those of the preceding Families.

The animals of the present Family are confined to South America, where they feed on farinaceous roots, on carrion, and on ants, the dwellings of which they tear away with their powerful claws. They burrow with amazing rapidity, so as to disappear in the earth before they can be seized when suddenly surprised. They have, more or less perfectly, the power of rolling themselves up into a ball.