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Armadillidae

family of isopods

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 14, 2026
Entity authorityQ4397268 ↗
Source-derived summary

Armadillidae is a family of woodlice (Oniscidea; terrestrial crustaceans), comprising around 80 genera and 700 species. It is the largest family of Oniscidea, and one of the most species-rich families of the entire Isopoda. Most of the armadillid taxa are not monophyletic. Armadillids generally have a strongly convex body shape, with some rather shallowly convex. Like members of the woodlice family Armadillidiidae, armadillids are capable of enrolling into a sphere (conglobation), and are commonly known as pill bugs. Some species, however, have secondarily lost their conglobation ability. For example, a species exists in which the males lack the inner face of the coxal plates and are therefore unable to conglobate. Armadillids differ from the Armadillidiidae in that the antennae are fully enclosed within the sphere.

Species of Armadillidae occur in a variety of habitats including forests, savannas, and arid regions. Armadillids occur natively in the Afrotropics, Asia, Australia, the Neotropics, and the Mediterranean region of Europe.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Armadillidae” is family of isopods. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Armadillidae, family and isopods, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current 156-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Armadillidae, family and isopods is the immediate research focus.
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The phrase “family of isopods” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4397268. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Armadillidae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.