Time for Challenge #3 -- online magazines, newspapers in SIRS Discoverer and Issues Researcher.

SIRS Discoverer

First I did a "keyword" search on armadillo, got back 84 total articles, 7 were newspaper, 45 were magazine articles, 22 were references, 8 were graphics (yea!  pictures), but zero were websites..

I looked at a couple of newspaper articles, magazine articles, references and graphics just to get an idea of what is out there. 

Newspaper articles, the first one that caught my eye was the State Quarters project.  Seems that there were original plans to have the armadillo on the quarter.  Didn't happen, the flag's star made the cut.  Second one I looked at was called "These wrinkles are all wet".  Interesting article about why fingers and toes wrinkle when in water but the rest of the body doesn't (you'd end up looking like an armadillo).  Fascinating.

Magazine articles, the first one I looked at was The Strange Armadillo by Freda K. Routh, she describes an armillo as a strange animal it has a nose and face like a rat, a shell-shaped body of an alligator and claws like a leopard.  Pretty good visual image there!  Second one was Where Do You Keep Your Skeleton? by Alice Andre-Clark, talks about the differences between excoskelton (skeleton on the outside of the body like some insects, lobsters and crabs; and endoskeltons, like humans and most mammels.  Turtles and armadillos have both and exco and endo skelton.

References, plenty of things from Compton's by Britannica including the article on armadillos with definitions, descriptions and a picture.  Nice.  Scrolled down to get something from SIRS Discoverer that also included armadillos and went to the Texas (Archive).  This is a fairly extensive overview Texas history, facts and figures.  The armadillo show up as the State Symbol for Animal.  The nice thing about this is there is plenty of other information if you want to know more about Texas as well as armadillos


Graphics.  First one I looked at was the "defensive" pose, I saw it referred to a couple of times in the information above and wanted to see what it looked like.  Fascinating, it looks like an armored ball!  Second one I looked at was Giant Armadillo (didn't know they came in a giant size) so I clicked back to the article after looking at the picture, Since they are from South America it probably isn't too surprising I didn't know about them.


Summary of SIRS Discoverer.  Fascinating things here, other than some basic background in Compton's or if looking for images it probably would not be a site I refer many college students too, but I enjoyed visiting it.