Anteaters and allies

Abstract

The practice of eating ants has been adopted by a number of different mammals. To be a successful anteater, ant nests have to be located by smell, the rock-hard exterior broken open with powerful claws, and the ants collected on a long, sticky tongue which can be passed down the galleries of the nest. Anteaters, therefore, tend to have skulls with a weak lower jaw and no teeth, a smooth conical shape and a prominent olfactory region. In some cases mammals that began their evolution as anteaters, like the sloths and armadillos, changed their diet and became vegetarians or scavengers before the process of adaptation to anteating was complete, so that a second set of features came to overlay and modify the first.