A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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armadillo
A New World mammal armored in bony plates set into leathery skin — the only living mammal with an external bony shell. Twenty-one species, nearly all South American. The nine-banded armadillo crossed the Rio Grande into Texas in the middle of the nineteenth century and has been moving north and east ever since. It digs constantly, sees badly, and jumps straight up when startled, which is why so many of them die under cars that would otherwise have passed over them.
Etymology
Spanish armadillo, little armored one, from armado (armed) with the diminutive -illo, in English by about 1577. The name it displaced is better: Nahuatl āyōtōchtli, from āyōtl (turtle) and tōchtli (rabbit) — turtle-rabbit, which describes the animal from the front and the back at the same time. Portuguese kept a third, tatu, from Tupi, roughly “dense bark.” Elsewhere in South America it is quirquincho, and in Central America cuzuco. Four languages looked at the same animal and named it for armor, for two other animals, for its hide, and for nothing recoverable at all.
Notes
The nine-banded armadillo almost always bears identical quadruplets from a single fertilized egg. In the Andes the shell is the traditional sound box of the charango.