On our planet there lives a unique tiny creature: having a body
length of 13-15 cm and weight of up to 110 g, it is able to withstand a
load exceeding its mass by 1000 times! That is, if a grown-up man of
average fatness gets on the back of this crumb, then it will remain
alive. We are talking about the Ugandan white-toothed armadillo, a small
animal from the family of earthmovers, living in the marshy forests of
equatorial Africa. Inhabitants of the Congo Valley, the shrews are
credited with magical power because of their ability to withstand giant
loads. According to superstition, to become invulnerable, it is enough
to have a skin or any part of the animal’s body.
The reason for the unprecedented power of a tiny strong man lies in
the structure of the skeleton – no such fine vertebral mammal has such a
complex anatomy. The spine of the belozubki-bronenoski is 4% of the
total body weight of the animal, while in others it does not exceed
0.5-1.6%. In addition, all the vertebrae of the strong crust consist not
only of the lateral processes, but also of the lower (ventral) and
upper (dorsal) processes. The lumbar division is also different – it has
11 vertebrae, not 5, as in most vertebrates. This structure gives the
back the greatest degree of mobility, which, in turn, gives an advantage
in the translational motion. It is an anatomical feature that allows
the white tooth to withstand a huge load on the body.
The Ugandan white-toothed armor was discovered by biologists in 1910,
although the image of her life has not been fully studied to this day.
And more recently, in 2013, scientists have discovered a related species
– the Torah white tooth (named after the god Thor), which also has a
specific skeleton structure that allows the animal to withstand loads
exceeding the body weight by orders of magnitude. The “old” and “new”
white-belts fall into each other’s evolutionarily close relatives: their
paths diverged about 4 million years ago. The back of the Torah is
weaker than that of a relative, although there is no doubt about the
exceptional strength of her spine.
