Dasypus kappleri Krauss, 1862

VOSS, ROBERT S., LUNDE, DARRIN P. & SIMMONS, NANCY B., 2001, The Mammals Of Paracou, French Guiana: A Neotropical Lowland Rainforest Fauna Part 2. Nonvolant Species, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2001 (263), pp. 1-236 : 65

Dasypus kappleri Krauss

VOUCHER MATERIAL: AMNH 267011. Total = 1 specimen.

IDENTIFICATION: Our single voucher conforms exactly in qualitative external and cranial characters to Husson’s (1978) and Wetzel and Mondolfi’s ( 1979) descriptions of this species, the type locality of which is in Surinam. For comparison with quantitative data summarized by those authors, the external measurements of our adult male voucher were 565 Χ 405 Χ 125 Χ 53 mm, and it weighed 10.6 kg. The carapace of this specimen has eight movable bands, of which the fourth has 58 scutes; the condylonasal length of the skull is 128.6 mm, the zygomatic width 53.2 mm, and the mastoidal width 35.3 mm; there are eight paired maxillary teeth and eight paired mandibular teeth (meristic counts and cranial measurements follow Wetzel and Mondolfi’s conventions).

FIELD OBSERVATIONS: Our single voucher of Dasypus kappleri and two other individuals (unambiguously identified but not collected) were all encountered at night, foraging singly on the ground in primary forest. Several other armadillo encounters recorded in our fieldnotes might have been of this species, but positive identification requires a clear and reasonably close view (to accurately judge size or to see the enlarged scutes on the knee), and many animals were only seen fleetingly or at a distance. Because we doubt­ ed that the forestry workers and local hunters with whom we spoke reliably distinguished this armadillo from the smaller but otherwise externally similar D. novemcinctus , we did not collect second­hand information about Dasypus species.