Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
The rest of all these animals had been cleared off by the ants, and carried into the cells of their hollow cones! It was, no doubt, the noise of the bark-hunters that had started the ant-eaters abroad, for these creatures usually prowl only in the night. The same may have aroused the fierce puma from his lair, although he is not strictly a nocturnal hunter.
A voyage to South America must have been made to obtain tapirs, pumas, peccaries, sloths, ant-eaters, armadillos, fourteen each of the llama, alpaca, and vicuna, beside monkeys, birds, and insects innumerable. A vessel nearly as large as "The Great Eastern" must have been employed, or a number of smaller ones, to accommodate the collectors, the animals, and food for a voyage across the Atlantic.
"It is a name given it," replied the lady, "on account of its fierce habits, which, in that respect, assimilate it to its powerful namesake, the king of the beasts; and, indeed, this little creature has more strength and ferocity in proportion to its size than even the lion himself." "But why the ant-lion, mamma?" "Because it preys principally on ants. I have said there are insect ant-eaters.
In Africa the ant-eaters are represented by several kinds of animals, differing essentially from each other in outward appearance, though all agreeing in their habits, or rather in the nature of their food. The Aard-vark, or Earth-hog, of the Cape colonists, is the most noted kind.
"The Flicker's beak is more slender and curving than those of his brethren, and he has an extremely long, barbed tongue, which, he uses to probe ant-hills. The sticky substance in the bird's mouth covers the little barbs on its tongue, and thus he is able to catch a great many ants at a time. He is one of our best ant-eaters."
In this collection there are extinct species of all the thirty-two genera, excepting four, of the terrestrial quadrupeds now inhabiting the provinces in which the caves occur; and the extinct species are much more numerous than those now living: there are fossil ant-eaters, armadillos, tapirs, peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and numerous South American gnawers and monkeys, and other animals.
"Yes, they are ant-eaters' holes, and very dangerous; I have seen them several feet deep. If we do not start to-day, I will ask the Hottentots to try and procure one for me to-night, as I wish to have a stuffed specimen." "We do not intend to start till to-morrow morning," replied Alexander; "we must dismiss the Caffres to-night, that they may be also ready to go home to-morrow.
In South America he saw an intimate relationship between the extinct species of ant-eaters, armadillos, tapirs, peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and so on, and the living species of these animals; and he adds that the wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living would doubtless hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.
One of our haphazard turns at last brought us into a muddy bye-road with long lines of "Seventy-fives" ranged along its banks like grey ant-eaters in some monstrous menagerie. A little farther on we came to a bemired village swarming with artillery and cavalry, and found ourselves in the thick of an encampment just on the move.
The relationship, though distant, between the Macrauchenia and the Guanaco, between the Toxodon and the Capybara, the closer relationship between the many extinct Edentata and the living sloths, ant-eaters, and armadillos, now so eminently characteristic of South American zoology, and the still closer relationship between the fossil and living species of Ctenomys and Hydrochaerus, are most interesting facts.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking