I'm new to modeling so I thought I would use a tutorial for creating new meshes using blender. At one point it says to delete the armatures of the mesh, and being a total newb at this couldn't figure it out. so, what does an armature look like and how can they be deleted?

armatures is what blender calls a skeleton. its made up of a hierarchy of bone objects. bones typically look like long pointy triangle things. http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/4/43/RDS.03.png
< often in a discernible body shape, like a biped or quadruped creature

Okay thanks for the help!

When you import a mesh, I used the chainmail cuirass, the http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c183/Elora_Q2005/_Aprature.jpg (the little horizonal lines) this as the other poster said is the skeleton, but you will be putting in your own skeleton that is parented to your mesh. Sometimes they are hard to see and you need to move the view of the image around or put it into the wire view. Good luck.