Taxonomic orders are major groups of organisms, such as carnivores, or rodents, or bats. The order that includes sloths, armadillos, and some anteaters currently is called the Xenarthra by most biologists, but the name Edentata often has been used. "Xenarthra" can be translated as "foreign or strange joint", which seems really weird until you find out that some of their backbone segments have extra joints not found in other mammals. "Edentata" means "without teeth", which is really even more weird, because most of them HAVE teeth, though not the enamel covered, complex teeth we have come to expect in mammals.
Edentates were well represented in the northern Chihuahuan Desert
during the Pleistocene ice ages in the form of sloths and glyptodonts, but today, that
icon of Texas, the armadillo, doesn't come quite far enough west. Depending heavily
on invertebrate prey in ground litter and soft soils for food, armadillos apparently
find our desert too inhospitable. And this is a shame, for now we have no creature with
the curious habit of giving birth only to quadruplets of the same sex.
Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.
Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Feldhamer, G. A., L. C. Drickamer, S. H. Vessey, and J. F. Merritt. 1999. Mammalogy. McGraw Hill, Boston. 563 pp.