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Giant Anteater — printable fact sheet
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Giant Anteater
Myrmecophaga tridactyla
The giant anteater has no teeth at all. In their place it deploys a tongue up to about 60 cm long, coated in sticky saliva and anchored to the sternum rather than the skull, which it flicks in and out roughly 150 times a minute — fast enough to strip a nest before the insects mo…
Did you know?
- The giant anteater’s sense of smell is 40 times more sensitive than that of humans, helping it locate insect nests even underground.
- The giant anteater has no teeth, and a 60 cm tongue anchored to its sternum rather than its skull. It flicks that tongue about 150 times a minute and eats tens of thousands of insects a day. It knuckle-walks because its front claws are too long to walk on flat palms. Its likeness to aardvarks and pangolins is convergent evolution, not shared ancestry.
What I learned
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