Out of all the mammals on earth, there are only two groups that don’t grow any teeth: pangolins and anteaters. Because they don’t have any teeth, they have no way to chew their food. Fortunately, both groups of animals don’t need to chew. Instead, they have long sticky tongues for capturing ants and other insects!
Out of all the mammals on earth, there are only two groups that don’t grow any teeth: pangolins and anteaters. Because they don’t have any teeth, they have no way to chew their food. Fortunately, both groups of animals don’t need to chew. Instead, they have long sticky tongues for capturing ants and other insects!
And anteater’s tonuge is long and sticky, and covered with spines. When it gets hungry, the anteater flicks its tongue deep inside an ant colony, and the ants inside are glued to the sticky surface. By fishing for ants this way, the anteater can collect up 30,000 ants a day! It does need some way of crushing up all these insects, but instead of teeth, the ants are ground against hard growths inside the anteater’s mouth. If that’s not enough, the anteater also swallow rocks to crush the ants in its tough stomach!
Pangolins feed much like anteaters do, but they look very different. Instead of fur, pangolins are covered with tough, overlapping scales. This is useful if the pangolin is threatened, because it can curl up into a ball with only its scales showing (making it look a bit like a giant pinecone or artichoke), making it very difficult for a predator to harm it.
Pangolins are also very clever. This lets them find food in strange, hard-to-reach places, but it also means that pangolins in captivity are true escape artists!
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Raven
February 13, 2019, 11:09 amI had thought Platipuses, baleen whales, anteaters, pangolins, and echidnas were also toothless?
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