A recent bit of news from South America has attracted unwonted attention on the part of zoologists to the highlands of Southern Brazil. There is reason to believe that a gigantic animal of subterranean habits, as yet unknown to naturalists, exists in the region where the great rivers Paragury and Parana take their rise. It is variously described, but all accounts represent it as a very large trench-digging creature not less than three feet in thickness. The inhabitants call it the Minhocao, and believe it to be an enormous scale-covered earth worm some fifty yards long, which ploughs up the ground after the fashion of a giant mole, overturning full-grown trees in its path.
    Stories of such an animal would be worthy of little attention if they came from a single unknown traveller. As it is, however, they are communicated to the scientific world by an accomplished German naturalists. Fritz Muller, long resident in Brazil, who was carefully collected and weighed the evidence as to the asserted existence of this underground monster. Native testimony certainly makes out a pretty strong probability that some such creature exists. Herr Muller has never seen the animal himself, but from his summary of the native accounts furnished to the Zoological Garden, a German journal of natural history, it appears to have been seen on at least three occasions. It is found only near rivers. To one observer, who saw it lying on the bank of a stream, it seemed “an animal of gigantic size, nearly one metre in thickness, not very long, and with a snout like a pig, but whether it had legs or not he could not tell.” Before he could procure assistance to attack it, the strange creature had buried itself in a trench of its own making. In another instance a Minhocao seems to have undermined and drawn off a large pool. A negro woman, who went thither for water, found that the water was all gone, but saw an animal in the vicinity, “as big as a house,” moving rapidly away. This was in the Brazilian province of Parana, where some time afterward a young man had a still more remarkable adventure. He saw a pine tree fall suddenly and without any apparent cause. Hastening to the spot “he found the surrounding earth in movement, and an enormous worm-like-black animal in the middle of it, about twenty-five metres long and with two horns on its head.”
    Apart from these views of the animal itself, there is proof of the existence of trench-like excavations in the South Brazilian highlands, the formation of which must be attributed to living creatures. Nature, the English scientific journal from which we have quoted the foregoing description, accepts the evidence as conclusive on this point. What, then, are the true characteristics of the animal? The width of the trenches leaves little doubt that it is large ; a small beast would hardly make a gallery underground, twelve feet wide and over a half mile long, such as was discovered in the valley of the river Cachorros. It is also tolerably certain that the Minhocao likes to live in damp places. Beyond this, the evidence relating to the animal affords great scope to the imagination.
    The idea thrown out by Nature that this so-called subterranean serpent may be a last descendent of the Glyptodonts has led to a search of the leading authorities as to that remarkable genus of mammals. The Glyptodon, says Prof. Huxley, is essentially a large armadillo, though it departs in some respects not only from all armadillos, but from all other mammalia, and even stands alone among the vertebrata. Seven species of Glyptodonts are mentioned by Andrew Murray, in his large quarto work on the geographical distribution of animals; of these, four occur in Buenos Ayres, and three in the Brazilian bone caves. Until now, the entire genus has been regarded as extinct, and the remains from which these species are described, occur as fossils in the poet-tertiary formations of South America. A picture of a Glyptodon (G. clavipes) may be found at page 612 of Nicholson’s Manual of Zoology. “They differed from living armadillos,” says the author of that work, “in having no bands in their armor, so that they must have been unable to roll themselves up. It is rare at the present day to meet with any armadillo over two or three feet in length ; but the length of the Glyptodon clavipes from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail was more than nine feet.”
    Taking all these facts together, do they not indicate the present existence of a wonderful “land varmint” in the shape of a gigantic armadillo ?

From— The Sedalia Weekly Bazoo. (Sedalia, Mo.), 26 March 1878. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.