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The aardvark is sometimes colloquially called the "African ant bear", [6] "anteater" (not to be confused with the South American anteaters), or the "Cape anteater" [6] after the Cape of Good Hope. The name "aardvark" is Afrikaans (pronounced [ˈɑːrtfark]) and comes from earlier Afrikaans erdvark. [6]
Aardvarks and pangolins are now placed in individual orders, and the new order Xenarthra was erected to group the remaining families (which are all related). The morphology of xenarthrans generally suggests that the anteaters and sloths are more closely related to each other than either is to the armadillos, glyptodonts, and pampatheres; this ...
The name anteater refers to the species' diet, which consists mainly of ants and termites. Anteater has also been used as a common name for a number of animals that are not in Vermilingua, including the echidnas, numbat, pangolins, and aardvark.
Aardvarks had originally been categorized as relatives of American anteaters in the order Edentata. But their unique type of teeth and other morphological characteristics had made it clear that aardvarks are not closely related to any other living mammals.
Afrotheria (/ æ f r oʊ ˈ θ ɪər i ə / from Latin Afro-"of Africa" + theria "wild beast") is a superorder of placental mammals, the living members of which belong to groups that are either currently living in Africa or of African origin: golden moles, elephant shrews (also known as sengis), otter shrews, tenrecs, aardvarks, hyraxes, elephants, sea cows, and several extinct clades.
The tongues of pangolins are extremely long, and like those of the giant anteater and the tube-lipped nectar bat, the root of the tongue is not attached to the hyoid bone but is in the thorax between the sternum and the trachea. [31] Large pangolins can extend their tongues as much as 40 cm (16 in), with a diameter of only about 0.5 cm (1 ⁄ 5 ...
The giant anteater is the most terrestrial of the living anteater species; specialization for life on the ground appears to be a new trait in anteater evolution. The transition to life on the ground could have been aided by the expansion of open habitats such as savanna in South America and the abundance of native colonial insects , such as ...
Orycteropus afer (Pallas, 1766) – aardvark – Palaeolithic to Recent of Africa † Orycteropus abundulafus Lehmann, Vignaud, Likius & Brunet, 2005 † Orycteropus crassidens MacInnes, 1955 [4] – Pleistocene of Kenya † Orycteropus djourabensis Lehmann, Vignaud, Mackaye & Brunet, 2004 [5] – Early Pliocene to Early Pleistocene of Chad and ...