Seven-banded armadillo
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The seven-banded armadillo (''Dasypus septemcinctus''), also known as the Brazilian lesser long-nosed armadillo, is a
species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...
of armadillo from
South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...
found in Paraguay,
Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
, Bolivia and
Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. It is a solitary nocturnal, terrestrial animal, living mostly in dry habitats, outside of rainforest regions.


Description

Long-nosed armadillos have a broad, depressed body, an obtusely pointed
rostrum Rostrum may refer to: * Any kind of a platform for a speaker: **dais **pulpit * Rostrum (anatomy), a beak, or anatomical structure resembling a beak, as in the mouthparts of many sucking insects * Rostrum (ship), a form of bow on naval ships * Ros ...
, long, pointed ears and short legs. The carapace consists of two immobile plates, separated by six or seven movable bands, which are connected to each other by a fold of hairless skin. The carapace is mostly blackish, hairless and with the scales of the anterior edge of the movable bands not notably different in colour from the rest of the dorsum. Lateral scutes have dark blackish-pink centres only slightly discernible from the rest of the carapace, but never as obviously pale as in the nine-banded armadillo. Scutes on the movable bands are triangular in shape, but those on the main plates are rounded. The number of scutes present on the fourth movable band varies from 44 to 52, with a mean of 48.4.


Reproduction

Females give birth to seven to nine genetically identical offspring.Esquivel. (2001). - Mamíferos de la Reserva Natural del Bosque Mbaracayú, Paraguay - Fundación Moises Bertoni, Asunción).


References

* Arne å. Hammons and Francois Feör, 1997 - Neotropical Rainforest Mammals, A Field Guide. * Cope ED 1889 - On the Mammalia Obtained by the Naturalist Exploring Expedition to Southern Brazil - American Naturalist 23: p128-150. * Gardner AL 2007
Mammals of South America Vol 1: Marsupials, Xenarthrans, Shrews and Bats
- University of Chicago Press, Chicago. * Armadillos Mammals of Argentina Mammals of Bolivia Mammals of Brazil Mammals of Paraguay Fauna of the Pantanal Least concern biota of South America Mammals described in 1758 Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus {{mammal-stub