How is an armadillo like a griffon vulture in the Crimea?

The first of the two dreams recounted in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask" has a scene in which carrion birds, including the vulture of the title, flock around a carcass. This made me think of Jesus' saying that "wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together" (Matt. 24:28). The intended meaning of this saying has always been unclear to me, so I checked several Bible commentaries to see if anyone had any good ideas. Interpretations are all over the map, ranging from Christians flocking around Jesus to the Roman legions descending on Jerusalem, so what Jesus meant is anyone's guess.

In terms of sync, though, this note in Marvin Vincent's Word Studies in the New Testament (1897) caught my eye:

In my dream, the vulture is a griffon vulture (I identify it as Gyps africanus, but all griffon vultures look pretty similar), and its name is Odessa Grigorievna -- Odessa not normally being a personal name but rather the name of a city in the Ukraine, situated on the northern shore of the Black Sea. In Vincent's commentary on Matt. 24:28, he specified that "The griffon vulture is meant" and then shares a brief anecdote about how "In the Russian war vast numbers [of griffon vultures] were collected in the Crimea . . . although previously scarcely known in the country." The Crimea is on the northern shore of the Black Sea, not at all far from Odessa, and would later become part of the Ukraine.

The Ukraine is hardly the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of vultures -- Vincent mentions that they are "scarcely known in the country" under normal circumstances -- so it's quite a coincidence that my vulture should be named Odessa and that Vincent should devote half of his very brief note to a story about vultures in the Crimea.

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In "The Tinleys and the small key of David," I connect the griffon vulture from my dream with a story I wrote as a child in which two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small are tasked with killing a griffin. I mention in the post that "their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly." Tinley Big was 20 feet tall; Tinley Small, only two feet.

I wrote the above note about griffon vultures in the Ukraine before a morning tutoring session with an adult student. He had read an English article about armadillos, and we discussed it together this morning. I had not seen the article prior to our meeting. A few parts of the article caught my eye:

In the first two lines of the article, we have armored juxtaposed with certainly. The next paragraph talks about the extreme size difference between the smallest armadillo species and the largest. This syncs with my story about two armored knights, one 10 times as tall as the other, whose names are a pun on the word certainly.

But obviously nothing in an article about armadillos is going to sync with Vincent's story about griffon vultures in the Crimea, right? . . . Right?

Vincent says that the griffon vulture "scents its prey from afar" -- its prey being dead bodies -- and backs this up with a story about vultures from distant countries converging on the Crimea during the war. The armadillo article notes that these animals, too, find food, including "dead animals using their powerful sense of smell. Sometimes they travel long distances in search of food."