It is really astonishing that only
one small ruminant should be found on this immense grassy area, so
admirably suited to herbivorous quadrupeds, a portion of which at the
present moment affords sufficient pasture to eighty millions of sheep,
cattle, and horses. In La Plata the author of _The Mammoth and the
Flood_ will find few to quarrel with his doctrine.
Of Edentates there are four. The giant armadillo does not range so far,
and the delicate little pink fairy armadillo, the truncated
Chlamydophorus, is a dweller in the sand-dunes of Mendoza, and has never
colonized the grassy pampas. The Tatusia hybrida, called "little mule"
from the length of its ears, and the Dasypus tricinctus, which, when
disturbed, rolls itself into a ball, the wedge-shaped head and
wedge-shaped tail admirably fitting into the deep-cut shell side by
side; and the _quirquincho_ (Dasypus minutus), all inhabit the pampa,
are diurnal, and feed exclusively on insects, chiefly ants. Wherever the
country becomes settled, these three disappear, owing to the dulness of
their senses, especially that of sight, and to the diurnal habit, which
was an advantage to them, and enabled them to survive when rapacious
animals, which are mostly nocturnal, were their only enemies. The
fourth, and most important, is the hairy armadillo, with habits which
are in strange contrast to those of its perishing congeners, and which
seem to mock many hard-and-fast rules concerning animal life.
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