Nine-banded armadillos

What we know

The nine-banded armadillo is in GTA 6 according to three outlets: IGN's list of animals seen in Rockstar's trailers and screenshots, Sportskeeda's report on Game Informer's cover story, and Polygon, which names armadillos among the 170+ species. Rockstar has not shown one in a trailer, and Game Informer's free summary of the story does not mention them, so we keep the status at reported.

Sportskeeda groups the armadillo with feral cats, cane toads and rhesus macaques. Game Informer's own list of invasive species in Leonida names green iguanas, cane toads, feral cats and rhesus macaques, without the armadillo.

The real Florida armadillo

That difference matters, because Florida's wildlife agency (FWC) doesn't treat the armadillo like the cane toad. It describes the nine-banded armadillo as a native mammal of southwestern North America that expanded its range into Florida, helped by introductions on the state's east coast as early as the 1920s, and now "considered to be naturalized" across most of the state. FWC's other details read like a list of animal behaviours a Rockstar animator would love:

• It is about the size of a cat, 15 to 17 inches long without the tail.
• It is most active at night and has very poor eyesight.
• It crosses narrow water by walking along the bottom, and swims wider water by inflating its stomach to twice its normal size.
• When startled, it often leaps high into the air, then runs for a burrow.

Our take: the armadillo is a night animal, so look for one after dark, in woods and semi-open ground with soft soil, rather than at midday in the city. If Rockstar copies the real animal as closely as Michael Kane suggested to Game Informer ("accurately researched"), the startle jump is the detail to watch for: it is exactly the kind of small, surprising behaviour that made Red Dead Redemption 2's wildlife memorable. We'd expect armadillos to be a checklist animal rather than anything you hunt for money. Aftermath already ranks them seventh of 35 GTA 6 animals for the river-walking trick alone.

What to watch for at launch

• Whether armadillos only come out at night.
• Whether they leap when startled, like real ones.
• Whether Rockstar files them as invasive or native in the animal checklist.