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South American Tapir — printable fact sheet
Free to print or save as PDF. Great for classrooms, homeschooling, and young explorers.
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South American Tapir
Tapirus terrestris
The tapir looks like a pig crossed with an anteater and is closely related to neither. Its nearest living relatives are horses and rhinoceroses — all odd-toed ungulates — and the lineage is so ancient and so little altered that tapirs are routinely called living fossils. The sho…
Did you know?
- Despite their bulky appearance, South American Tapirs can run surprisingly fast and are agile in dense forest undergrowth.
- Its closest living relatives are horses and rhinos, not pigs, and the lineage has barely changed in millions of years. Its short trunk is a prehensile proboscis that doubles as a snorkel — tapirs walk along riverbeds underwater. It swallows large fruits whole and carries the seeds for kilometres, making it one of the last big seed dispersers left in Amazonia. Calves are born striped and spotted, and lose it within months.
What I learned
Draw the south american tapir
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