extensile

Updated: May 9, 2025

Strongly rooted, indeed, must that tree have been, which could have resisted such force! The Mylodon, moreover, was furnished with a long extensile tongue like that of the giraffe, which, by one of those beautiful provisions of nature, thus reaches with the aid of its long neck its leafy food.

Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle

But the "aard-vark" is just as good an ant-eater as he, can "crack" as thick-walled a house, can rake up and devour as many termites as any "ant-bear" in the length and breadth of the Amazon Valley. He has got, moreover, as "tall" a tail as the tamanoir, very nearly as long a snout, a mouth equally small, and a tongue as extensive and extensile.

Mayne Reid - The Bush Boys: History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family

He pronounced it to be one of the manides or scaly ant-eaters a rare animal, and seldom seen. It had a long extensile tongue, furnished with a glutinous mucous for securing its insect food. It was entirely destitute of teeth, so that it was evident it must suck in the creatures it caught, and swallow them whole.

William Henry Giles Kingston - In the Wilds of Africa

The woodpecker, which has a similar extensile mechanism for exserting its tongue to a great length, also uses it to procure its food in its case soft grubs from holes in rotten trees and to enable it to pull these out, the end of the tongue is sharp and horny, and barbed with short stiff recurved bristles.

Thomas Belt - The Naturalist in Nicaragua

Then suddenly, with a motion rapid as that of the most agile bird, the long cylindrical and readily extensile tongue is darted forth with unerring aim, and the prey is seized and swallowed in a single moment of time. The ordinary color of the chameleon is a pale olive-green.

George Rawlinson - The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5: Persia : The History, Geography, And Antiquities Of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Parthia, And Sassanian or New Persian Empire; With Maps and Illustrations.

I think it cannot be doubted that their natural residence is in an extensile deep subterranean lake, from which in great floods they sometimes are forced through the crevices of the rocks into this place where they are found; and it does not appear to me impossible, when the peculiar nature of the country in which we are is considered, that the same great cavity may furnish the individuals which have been found at Adelsberg and at Sittich.

Sir Humphry Davy - Consolations in Travel: or, the Last Days of a Philosopher