Where've The Armadillos Gone?

It wasn’t so long ago – five years, maybe – that I started noticing an increasing number of armadillo’s smooshed along the highway. In fact, there was about a year’s time when I’d point them out to my wife and she’d argue that it was a possum or some other animal. “There are no armadillo’s here,” she’d say. It got to the point that I was ready to pull over and scrape one up. (I even carried a small shovel in my pickup for awhile, though I never disclosed that to her. Unfortunately there is no triumphant ending to that tale … she simply began acknowledging their existence one day, as though it had never been a source of debate at all.
For a few years, the armadillo population of Missouri seemed to thrive – at least for the ones hit by cars. Armadillo had become the new possum. Sometime the summer-before-last, however, I noted that there were fewer instances of armadillo-cide along the Interstate. In fact, by late in the fall of 2007, I was well aware that I’d not seen a single one in quite some time. This summer past, I kept the odd little mammal at the forefront of my mind and held a vigilant watch for the critters. Unfortunately, (not so unfortunate for them, I suppose), I only saw a few deceased ‘dillos during the entire year of ‘08.
Now, many will say that the long-term infatuation with counting dead armadillos makes me, well … weird. I’d agree. However, there is a bigger picture here and I’d like to enlighten you all in the hopes that it somewhat blurs that weirdness to a dull oddity. When something intrigues me, I like to find the answer – so, I placed a call to a conservationist friend of mine …
RING-RING:
“Hello?”
“How come there aren’t any dead armadillo’s?” I asked.
“Who is this?”
“Bill”
“Bill who?”
“Never mind. Wrong number.”
I then redialed.
“Hello?”
“How come there aren’t any dead armadillos?” I asked.
“Look! I don’t know why you think this is funny, but if you call me again, I’m calling the Sheriff!”
Dang iPhone buttons … so much for that method.
In talking with a rather liberal friend of mine, he explained that the armadillo’s had come North due to the climactic changes caused by the ever-increasing release of greenhouse gasses. Something he likes to preach about called “Global Warming”. He said that the shifting of animal habitat was just one of many signs that we are killing the planet through our careless over-use of fossil fuels and destruction of the rain forests.
“Yeah,” I said, “but wouldn’t the fact that the armadillos are now disappearing support the theory that the entire issue of global warming is merely a farce that was illogically and maliciously forced down our throats by a liberal media during a naturally recurring period of Earth’s surface temperature warming? I mean, that side claims that we’re now in the second year of a 17-year cooling cycle, and I would think that the armadillos vanishing would most likely mean that they’ve returned to their natural climate, right?” My friend turned somewhat red-faced and soon concocted an excuse to leave. I also find it funny that he drives a Hummer. Hypocrite. I do so enjoy ticking him off.
Personally, I’m guessing that the recent decline in armadillo populous is simply an evolution thing … survival of the fittest and all that. You see, science would totally disagree with this theory but to me it makes sense. You take the armadillo (family Dasypodidae) and the opossum (Didelphis virginiana) and you find that they look very much alike in some ways. (Forget for a moment that one is a mammal and the other a marsupial. Logic has no place in this.)
I figure, somewhere along the line they were the same animal all living in the Southern U.S. At some point, two of the families got into an argument that became quite heated. The braver of the two stayed put and defended its ground, while the cowardly family ran North to make their home among the trees, where they could hide from threats. (Stay with me … I’m going somewhere with this.)
The family that stayed in the South procreated and as they evolved among the spiny thorns of cacti, they eventually developed a hard shell. The cowardly family that went North – into the colder climate, of course – grew a thick coat of fur and got really ugly from falling off of tree branches.
So, as millions of years went by, the descendants of the brave family finally got tired of burrowing in the sand and scrounging food. They decided that maybe the cowardly family in the North might have more to eat and a better life, so a band of them left the South sometime about the turn of the millennium to check it out.
When they got here, they watched the cowardly family, (who had also evolved to be quite stupid – probably from all the tree branch falls), and tried to figure out how they lived. They noticed that a vast number of the Northern cousins would walk into the roadways and try to attack the fast, giant beasts with lighted eyes – assumedly for food. So, for a few years, the brave Southern cousins stayed and also tried to catch the big, juicy beasts, figuring that if they could catch just one, they’d eat for a lifetime. After a while, however, they realized that the Northern rats weren’t trying to catch the cars, they simply froze with fear each time one came along.
Being the smarter of the two families, the Southern cousins shook their heads in disgust and headed back home to tell the others how dumb their Northern cousins were. And that, my dear friends, is where the armadillos have gone.

The way I see it, we’re lucky. With the way those Southern ones evolved, a million years from now, that shell would be hard enough to total our cars. Good riddance.