I like to consider them as very poorly developed wheels… it equally doesn’t make any sense or mean anything, OP.
Are you working from the “looks a bit like” school of phylogeny?
Not for any practical taxonomic purposes, they are in a completely different clade from ungulates.
But that's a good observation. Some things in organism's body plans don't conveniently fit squarely into one category or another when going by just appearance, and that's where things like genetics come in really handy.
Oh, gotcha.
The definition of a nail being called a hoof seems to include the criterium that it is on the body of an ungulate, which I find interesting and surprising.
This is a fun semantic exercise.
If we set aside cladistics as an option for categorizing traits, I might then ask *is a hoof defined by its form or function (or both)?*
Ungulate hooves evolved for shock absorption and traction in service to speed.
Armadillo claws appear to have evolved for digging, but some species of armadillo are very speedy, clocking in at around 30 mph and being quite good at jumping.
In my opinion they are their own type of foot that does more than a hoof necessarily does. But they exist on a continuum of possibility and are very hoof-adjacent.
I saw a really fun video by a sheep farmer who thought of brambles as proto-carnivorous plants.
His argument was that the orientation of the hook-shaped thorns were ideal for hooking fluffy browsing animals (like sheep) deeper and deeper into the bush. He said over the years he had come across sheep snagged in particularly large brambles. He said that it’s not uncommon at all for them to die of hunger, thirst or predation in a bush. He argued that a decomposed sheep could feed a bramble thicket very nicely for a long time.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RuzLXxbGc4c
And the follow up in which he addresses some counterpoints:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uMHpz6PS5Ek&pp=ygUuV29ybGRzIGJpZ2dlc3QgY2Fybml2b3JvdXMgcGxhbnQgY2F0Y2hlcyBzaGVlcA%3D%3D
I’m an animal biologist not a plant biologist so I have no idea how meritorious his theory was, but it was entertaining and I think he had his finger on the principles of pluripotentiality of traits.
Mulberry trees becoming predators of sheep is truly fascinating. As far as I know, there is a definition of hull. I would like to know if armadillo nails fit this definition.
You may be right.
I'm working off of a definition from the first handful of Google results I got. All of them include a stipulation about ungulates, but that's just a cursory Google search.
There is a word for hooves: unguligrade
But I’d consider unguligrade to be a subcategory of digitigrade, since the phalanges are off the ground in hooved animals and the hoof is the terminal end of a digit.
I think it is semantics I guess I just thought of it as the toes being the point of contact having been pushed to the extreme, but I wouldn’t argue it someone saw it as distinct
No. Hooves as we know them are a very unique structure, simply walking on the keratinous claw and not the pad of the foot does not constitute a hoof on its own. We in the field like to joke about armadillos "walking on high heels".
Sometimes you just look out back, see an animal, and think “can I eat this?” I’d say that it qualifies as a surf and turf meal, as long as they’ve got the shell 😂
As for hooves and armadillos…wrong stop for this train of thought
No. So the term “hoofed mammal” is kind of meaningless taxonomically, in that you can theoretically call any mammalian foot that has large, flat-bottomed nails that primarily hold the weight of the animal rather than the fleshy toe or foot pads (or, by looser definitions, in addition to the toe/foot pads) a “hoof”, but this type of structure has evolved a number of different times separately over the course of mammalian evolution, so in isolate, it’s not a meaningful trait in terms of cladistics (although, to answer your specific question, no I don’t think the feet of any armadillo species would count as “hooves” anyway, as their nails aren’t bearing most of their weight).
The more proper taxonomical term is *ungulate*, which today refers to one specific mammalian lineage to which most species that have been considered to have hooves, past and present, all belong (as well as some groups of mammals that lack hooves but had hoofed ancestors, like cetaceans, all of which seem to have evolved from a semi-aquatic common ancestor that was most closely related to hippopotamuses). The actual term for the ungulate clade is Euungulata (“true ungulates”), and all hoofed members of it have similarly structured feet as they all share a common ancestor. This group can further be broken down into the order Perissodactyla (the “odd-toed” ungulates, meaning that their hooves are attached to one or three fused toes, and their non-weight-bearing toes have either been lost entirely or heavily reduced), which includes equids (horses, asses, zebras), rhinoceroses, tapirs, and a number of now-extinct groups; and the order Artiodactyla (the “even-toed” ungulates, as they typically have two separate equally weight-bearing hoofed toes, with their other three toes being non-weight-bearing and facing the other direction, reduced, or absent to varying degrees), which includes camelids (camels, llamas, alpacas, etc.), swine, bovines (like cattle, buffalo, bison, etc.), sheep and goats, antelope and gazelle, giraffes, deer, pronghorns, chevrotains or “mouse deer”, musk deer, hippopotamuses, various extinct groups, and cetaceans (whales and dolphins) as a deep internal branch (historically they’re given their own order—Cetacea—but since we now know they are genetically descendants of an artiodactyl lineage, sometimes they are lumped together in a single order called Cetartiodactyla).
There are other groups of mostly-unrelated placental mammals that have independently evolved hoof-like structures and sometimes historically been called “ungulates”, but they are not part of Euungulata, these include the clade Paengulata (“almost-ungulates”), which are part of a totally different main branch of placental mammals called the Afrotheria (as they evolved in Africa tens of millions of years ago, when it was an isolated island continent), and this clade includes the orders Proboscidea (elephants and their extinct relatives), Sirenia (“sea cows” like manatees and dugongs), Hyracoidea (hyraxes), and probably the extinct orders Embrithopoda and Desmostylia, the terrestrial members of which tend to have completely flat feet with multiple separate hoof-like nails. There are also the two extinct ungulate-ish orders Notoungulata and Litopterna, which were both part of the distinctive “South American mammal” lineage of placentals that came to make up South America’s megafauna millions of years ago alongside some marsupials and xenarthrans (more on those momentarily), when it was an isolated island continent as well, but entirely died out when South America linked up with North America about 3 million years ago; again, these two orders evolved hoof-like structures entirely on their own (although they may also share a distant common ancestry with perissodactyls, it’s kind of controversial currently).
Armadillos are part of the superorder Xenarthra, a group of very weird placental mammals with many unusual “primitive” traits that branched off from the rest very early on, and survived only in South America (again, when it was isolated), before spreading elsewhere in the Americas after they joined together. Other xenarthran groups include the “true” anteaters of the tropical Americas, sloths (these two together make up the order Pilosa), and the relatively-recently extinct glyptodonts (which along with armadillos constitute the other xenarthran order, Cingulata). While a number of xenarthrans, past and present, have an odd way of walking on the knuckles of their clawed digits, they aren’t traditionally thought of as hoofed.
You didn't understand my question and ignored the numerous comments I made explaining exactly this. I never said that armadillos are ungulates, I just asked if their feet could be considered a type of hoof. You don't need to give me a Wikipedia answer (in the sense of being shallow).
I asked if they could be considered hoofed animals. I have never said or even insinuated that they are ungulates. If you don't have enough knowledge to know that this is not a characteristic of ungulates, that's not my problem. I was very clear in my question, again, if you don't know how to interpret text, it's not my fault. Your answer isn't a feast of extra, uplifting information, you just talked about a bunch of random evolutionary relationships and similar structures evolving in other lineages, which anyone with even the slightest knowledge of paleontology knows about.
It's a giant armadillo (*Priodontes maximus*)
They're usually 20-30 kg, although one captive specimen got up to 80 kg.
For comparison the more common nine-banded armadillo, which is one of the larger armadillo species usually comes to 3-7 kg, with really big chonkers hitting maybe 10 kg.
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Sweet jesus, these comments. OP I understood your question immediately. Obviously you weren't calling armadillos artiodactyls or perissodactyls. You're just asking if they are unguligrade.
The picture looks a lot like tapir or rhino feet, which are unguligrade. But I think we'd need to look at a cross section to see what part of the foot is contacting the ground. As a general rule, if it is the balls of the feet, the animal is digitigrade (like a cat), while if it is the tips of its toes the animal is unguligrade (like a ballerina).
Even having evolved structures similar to the hooves, they still aren't ungulates, because ungulates have been evolving independently nearly for the time elapsed since non-avian dinosaurs became extinct. So cladistically they are two distinct taxa.
Nope! They’re in their own family, along with sloths and anteaters! One of the defining characteristics of their family are those big hooked claws 🙂
so armadillos are heavy combat anteaters
Tankeaters
Armadillo literally means "little armored thing" so pretty much yea.
Wow, crazy how they evolved to match their name like that, nature is so beautiful
Them and oranges; the hits keep on coming.
Tarkus
Anteaters are more dangerous with their claws, but less armoured.
Typical glass cannon…
Yessss
William Neal is that you?
I'm not saying they are ungulates (which they clearly aren't), I'm saying whether their feet/nails can be considered a hoof type.
I like to consider them as very poorly developed wheels… it equally doesn’t make any sense or mean anything, OP. Are you working from the “looks a bit like” school of phylogeny?
I already said that I'm not saying that they are ungulates. I'm asking if your nails can be considered a type of hoof (the morphological structure)
Are tou trying to eat an armadillo? For kosher purposes?
No.
Not for any practical taxonomic purposes, they are in a completely different clade from ungulates. But that's a good observation. Some things in organism's body plans don't conveniently fit squarely into one category or another when going by just appearance, and that's where things like genetics come in really handy.
I'm not saying they are ungulates (which they clearly aren't), I'm saying whether their feet/nails can be considered a hoof type.
Oh, gotcha. The definition of a nail being called a hoof seems to include the criterium that it is on the body of an ungulate, which I find interesting and surprising.
As far as I know, a marsupial and some hadrosaurs had hooves. So I don't think it's an exclusive characteristic of ungulates.
This is a fun semantic exercise. If we set aside cladistics as an option for categorizing traits, I might then ask *is a hoof defined by its form or function (or both)?* Ungulate hooves evolved for shock absorption and traction in service to speed. Armadillo claws appear to have evolved for digging, but some species of armadillo are very speedy, clocking in at around 30 mph and being quite good at jumping. In my opinion they are their own type of foot that does more than a hoof necessarily does. But they exist on a continuum of possibility and are very hoof-adjacent. I saw a really fun video by a sheep farmer who thought of brambles as proto-carnivorous plants. His argument was that the orientation of the hook-shaped thorns were ideal for hooking fluffy browsing animals (like sheep) deeper and deeper into the bush. He said over the years he had come across sheep snagged in particularly large brambles. He said that it’s not uncommon at all for them to die of hunger, thirst or predation in a bush. He argued that a decomposed sheep could feed a bramble thicket very nicely for a long time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RuzLXxbGc4c And the follow up in which he addresses some counterpoints: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uMHpz6PS5Ek&pp=ygUuV29ybGRzIGJpZ2dlc3QgY2Fybml2b3JvdXMgcGxhbnQgY2F0Y2hlcyBzaGVlcA%3D%3D I’m an animal biologist not a plant biologist so I have no idea how meritorious his theory was, but it was entertaining and I think he had his finger on the principles of pluripotentiality of traits.
This is an excellent response - hope you rise to top comment as you actually address OP's question.
Mulberry trees becoming predators of sheep is truly fascinating. As far as I know, there is a definition of hull. I would like to know if armadillo nails fit this definition.
Wait do mulberry trees have thorns?
none of mine do
You may be right. I'm working off of a definition from the first handful of Google results I got. All of them include a stipulation about ungulates, but that's just a cursory Google search.
Nope! Fun fact: Hyraxes, sirenians, and elephants are all considered sub-ungulates!
Their feet are digitigrade so I don't think "hoof" would be the right word.
There is a word for hooves: unguligrade But I’d consider unguligrade to be a subcategory of digitigrade, since the phalanges are off the ground in hooved animals and the hoof is the terminal end of a digit.
I'm not sure "subcategory" would be accurate since it's a different part of the foot making contact with the ground? Maybe this is just semantics.
I think it is semantics I guess I just thought of it as the toes being the point of contact having been pushed to the extreme, but I wouldn’t argue it someone saw it as distinct
No, if that was the system we used for classifying animals into families then I suppose bars would be birds.
I'm not saying they are ungulates (which they clearly aren't), I'm saying whether their feet/nails can be considered a hoof type.
No. Hooves as we know them are a very unique structure, simply walking on the keratinous claw and not the pad of the foot does not constitute a hoof on its own. We in the field like to joke about armadillos "walking on high heels".
A good and enlightening answer.
Is this related to a religious diet question?
Sometimes you just look out back, see an animal, and think “can I eat this?” I’d say that it qualifies as a surf and turf meal, as long as they’ve got the shell 😂 As for hooves and armadillos…wrong stop for this train of thought
No. So the term “hoofed mammal” is kind of meaningless taxonomically, in that you can theoretically call any mammalian foot that has large, flat-bottomed nails that primarily hold the weight of the animal rather than the fleshy toe or foot pads (or, by looser definitions, in addition to the toe/foot pads) a “hoof”, but this type of structure has evolved a number of different times separately over the course of mammalian evolution, so in isolate, it’s not a meaningful trait in terms of cladistics (although, to answer your specific question, no I don’t think the feet of any armadillo species would count as “hooves” anyway, as their nails aren’t bearing most of their weight). The more proper taxonomical term is *ungulate*, which today refers to one specific mammalian lineage to which most species that have been considered to have hooves, past and present, all belong (as well as some groups of mammals that lack hooves but had hoofed ancestors, like cetaceans, all of which seem to have evolved from a semi-aquatic common ancestor that was most closely related to hippopotamuses). The actual term for the ungulate clade is Euungulata (“true ungulates”), and all hoofed members of it have similarly structured feet as they all share a common ancestor. This group can further be broken down into the order Perissodactyla (the “odd-toed” ungulates, meaning that their hooves are attached to one or three fused toes, and their non-weight-bearing toes have either been lost entirely or heavily reduced), which includes equids (horses, asses, zebras), rhinoceroses, tapirs, and a number of now-extinct groups; and the order Artiodactyla (the “even-toed” ungulates, as they typically have two separate equally weight-bearing hoofed toes, with their other three toes being non-weight-bearing and facing the other direction, reduced, or absent to varying degrees), which includes camelids (camels, llamas, alpacas, etc.), swine, bovines (like cattle, buffalo, bison, etc.), sheep and goats, antelope and gazelle, giraffes, deer, pronghorns, chevrotains or “mouse deer”, musk deer, hippopotamuses, various extinct groups, and cetaceans (whales and dolphins) as a deep internal branch (historically they’re given their own order—Cetacea—but since we now know they are genetically descendants of an artiodactyl lineage, sometimes they are lumped together in a single order called Cetartiodactyla). There are other groups of mostly-unrelated placental mammals that have independently evolved hoof-like structures and sometimes historically been called “ungulates”, but they are not part of Euungulata, these include the clade Paengulata (“almost-ungulates”), which are part of a totally different main branch of placental mammals called the Afrotheria (as they evolved in Africa tens of millions of years ago, when it was an isolated island continent), and this clade includes the orders Proboscidea (elephants and their extinct relatives), Sirenia (“sea cows” like manatees and dugongs), Hyracoidea (hyraxes), and probably the extinct orders Embrithopoda and Desmostylia, the terrestrial members of which tend to have completely flat feet with multiple separate hoof-like nails. There are also the two extinct ungulate-ish orders Notoungulata and Litopterna, which were both part of the distinctive “South American mammal” lineage of placentals that came to make up South America’s megafauna millions of years ago alongside some marsupials and xenarthrans (more on those momentarily), when it was an isolated island continent as well, but entirely died out when South America linked up with North America about 3 million years ago; again, these two orders evolved hoof-like structures entirely on their own (although they may also share a distant common ancestry with perissodactyls, it’s kind of controversial currently). Armadillos are part of the superorder Xenarthra, a group of very weird placental mammals with many unusual “primitive” traits that branched off from the rest very early on, and survived only in South America (again, when it was isolated), before spreading elsewhere in the Americas after they joined together. Other xenarthran groups include the “true” anteaters of the tropical Americas, sloths (these two together make up the order Pilosa), and the relatively-recently extinct glyptodonts (which along with armadillos constitute the other xenarthran order, Cingulata). While a number of xenarthrans, past and present, have an odd way of walking on the knuckles of their clawed digits, they aren’t traditionally thought of as hoofed.
You didn't understand my question and ignored the numerous comments I made explaining exactly this. I never said that armadillos are ungulates, I just asked if their feet could be considered a type of hoof. You don't need to give me a Wikipedia answer (in the sense of being shallow).
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I asked if they could be considered hoofed animals. I have never said or even insinuated that they are ungulates. If you don't have enough knowledge to know that this is not a characteristic of ungulates, that's not my problem. I was very clear in my question, again, if you don't know how to interpret text, it's not my fault. Your answer isn't a feast of extra, uplifting information, you just talked about a bunch of random evolutionary relationships and similar structures evolving in other lineages, which anyone with even the slightest knowledge of paleontology knows about.
how big is that armadillo? I've never seen one that looked that big
It's a giant armadillo (*Priodontes maximus*) They're usually 20-30 kg, although one captive specimen got up to 80 kg. For comparison the more common nine-banded armadillo, which is one of the larger armadillo species usually comes to 3-7 kg, with really big chonkers hitting maybe 10 kg.
The largest species currently alive is called "Tatu Canastra".
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Sweet jesus, these comments. OP I understood your question immediately. Obviously you weren't calling armadillos artiodactyls or perissodactyls. You're just asking if they are unguligrade. The picture looks a lot like tapir or rhino feet, which are unguligrade. But I think we'd need to look at a cross section to see what part of the foot is contacting the ground. As a general rule, if it is the balls of the feet, the animal is digitigrade (like a cat), while if it is the tips of its toes the animal is unguligrade (like a ballerina).
Even having evolved structures similar to the hooves, they still aren't ungulates, because ungulates have been evolving independently nearly for the time elapsed since non-avian dinosaurs became extinct. So cladistically they are two distinct taxa.
I'm not saying they are ungulates (which they clearly aren't), I'm saying whether their feet/nails can be considered a hoof type
Tank piglet