{"id":165887,"date":"2025-06-07T20:43:15","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T20:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/165887\/"},"modified":"2025-06-07T20:43:15","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T20:43:15","slug":"rare-family-crossing-road-causes-driver-to-stop-in-her-tracks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/165887\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare Family Crossing Road Causes Driver To Stop In Her Tracks"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, Amanda Walding was driving to work near her home in Texas when something in the road ahead caught her eye.<\/p>\n

At first, it appeared to be a family of raccoons or opossums. From a distance, Walding could see a train of little babies marching in a row behind their mother, from one side of the street to the other.<\/p>\n

But then she got closer and put on the brakes \u2014 and that\u2019s when she realized this was actually a rare kind of sighting.<\/p>\n

Getty Images\/Sandi Smolker<\/a><\/p>\n

The animals Walding had stopped for were, in fact, armadillos. But there was something unique about this family \u2014 so much so she decided to share her encounter with officials from Texas Parks and Wildlife<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201c1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 \u2026 wait, what?\u201d Texas Parks and Wildlife wrote in a post<\/a>. \u201cTexas armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets. But this mom has 7 pups \u2014 a rare occurrence!\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s footage of Walding\u2019s surprise encounter with that unexpectedly large family:<\/p>\n

\u201cI had seen baby armadillos one other time in the wild a couple years ago. That momma had the typical four babies an armadillo has,\u201d Walding told The Dodo. \u201cI knew this was special and exciting when I counted that she had seven.\u201d<\/p>\n

The armadillo mom certainly had her hands full \u2014 though, in the end, says Walding, she was able to shuffle all seven babies safely across the road.<\/p>\n

But how did this mom come to have such a big family?<\/p>\n

Getty Images\/Kanokwalee Pusitanun<\/a><\/p>\n

According to the National Wildlife Federation, armadillos \u201calmost always\u201d have four identical offspring<\/a> \u2014 the result of a single fertilized egg splitting twice. However, though rare, variations from this norm are not unheard of.<\/p>\n

\u201cTexas Parks and Wildlife spoke with their specialist and confirmed it is possible that all seven do belong to this momma,\u201d Walding said.<\/p>\n

Another possibility is that the armadillo mom adopted several of the babies as orphans, but this cannot be known for sure.<\/p>\n

Either way, Walding is delighted to have been delayed by them:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is always so exciting to see the new babies in the spring and early summer,\u201d Walding said.<\/p>\n

\"World's<\/a>World’s Largest Armadillo Makes A Rare AppearanceThe shy giant had gotten a bit lost \u2014 but people were happy to point him in the right direction.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The other day, Amanda Walding was driving to work near her home in Texas when something in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[1718,1716,70,1715,9097,1713,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-165887","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animal-encounters","9":"tag-daily-dodo","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-standard","12":"tag-stephen-messenger","13":"tag-the-dodo","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114644033655930384","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}