Anteater
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a name given to several quite different animals, but particularly to a sloth-like family of tropical American eaters of ants, sometimes called ant bears. The great anteater is of the size of a badger. Its body is about twelve inches long; its neck and head eleven inches, and its tail sixteen inches. It has an extremely long snout and can extend its tongue nine inches. Indeed its tongue is so long that it must be doubled up in the mouth when not in use. It resembles a skunk, but its extremely long snout, immense tail, and huge fore claws show that its habits are its own. It is a slow animal. Much of its time is spent in sleeping, with its huge, bushy tail thrown over it for a hairy blanket. It prowls about always on the ground, in the forests of the Amazon. It has no teeth. It gathers ants with its long tongue from an ant hill or the trunk of a tree where they are running. Its front claws are so large that, when not in use for tearing open ant hills, they are doubled backward under the foot, especially in walking. Other smaller species, the size of a cat or less, climb trees and hang from branches by their tails, like monkeys. The young of the various species ride snugly on the mother's back, where they cling to her fur and are sheltered by the long hair of her tail. A somewhat similar animal is known in Africa as the aardvark. See Sloth ; Armadillo
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 measurements are far too small: the giant anteater is not "the size of a badger" but a beast up to two metres from snout to tail-tip and weighing 30–40 kg, with a tongue that can reach about 60 cm and flick well over a hundred times a minute. The 1910 note that the African aardvark is "a somewhat similar animal" is now read the other way round — molecular work since the 1990s places anteaters and sloths in Xenarthra, one of the four great branches of placental mammals, while the aardvark belongs to the African group Afrotheria, so the resemblance is pure convergence on an ant-eating diet. The natural history the entry gives — no teeth, backward-folded fore claws, the young riding on the mother's back — still holds. What has changed most is the animal's prospects: the IUCN now lists the giant anteater as Vulnerable, and it has disappeared from much of Central America and parts of its former southern range.
Written for this edition, 2026.