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 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.

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!

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...

It's hot-wheels car sized.

The car is perhaps a Citroën Ami.

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.

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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.

maybe they were thinking of those?

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

You're obviously not a clown then!

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

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.

Milei deflation

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.

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.

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

the article says they are herbivores

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?

No.

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