The humongous armored prehistoric beasts Glyptodonts have many similarities with armadillos. Despite differences in size, both animals have almost same body shapes and bony skin that forms a shell over their heads, tails and backs.

In order to find more evidence of the glyptodonts’ relationship to extant armadillos, a team of geneticists dug into the ancient animals’ DNA. They have published their findings in a paper published Monday in the journal Current Biology. The team, after sequencing the mitochondrial DNA of a 12,000-year-old fossil belonging to the genus Doedicurus, which is one of the largest and most recent of the glyptodonts, came to the conclusion that the immense animals are indeed buried deep in the armadillo family.

Some scientists suggested glyptodonts are armadillos, but others claimed that the gigantic animals’ lineage divided at some point of time and they are cousins to today’s armadillos. There was yet another category of geneticists who opined that glyptodonts were more distant members of the superorder Xenarthra, which includes armadillos, anteaters and tree sloths.

Glyptodonts once lived across the Americas through the Pleistocene and they went extinct along with the mammoth, mastodon, saber-toothed cats, and other megafauna around 11,000 years ago. Scientists say the extinction could have been caused by humans by direct hunting or by changing the habitat.

Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University said, “Ancient DNA has the potential to solve a number of evolutionary questions, but it is often extremely difficult to obtain endogenous DNA, that is, DNA actually belonging to the animal being sampled, rather than some contaminant”.

Poinar said they used a technical trick in this particular case, which allowed them to selectively enrich their Doedicurus DNA extract so that they had enough endogenous genetic material to work with. He attributed the notable expansion and contraction that goes on through the evolutionary history of this species to describe the size of glyptodonts.