Earth pig is Africa's loneliest mammal order
Despite looking vaguely porcine, the aardvark is not a pig at all. It is the last living member of Tubulidentata, an obscure order defined by teeth built from tiny tubes. By night it digs for ants and termites; by day it hides underground. Its closest living cousins sit among elephants, hyraxes, and elephant shrews.
Afrikaans speakers named it earth pig for its burrowing habit, and colloquial labels such as African ant bear or Cape anteater invite the same mix-up. The scientific genus Orycteropus means burrowing foot; afer points to Africa; Tubulidentata names those distinctive teeth. Anatomy and genetics place it among afrotherians, the African mammal clade that also holds elephants, manatees, and hyraxes. Resemblance to South American anteaters is convergent evolution, not kinship. Bryan Patterson's fossil work puts early relatives in Africa near the end of the Paleocene, while the first clear tubulidentate, Myorycteropus africanus, comes from Kenyan Miocene beds.
A typical adult weighs sixty to eighty kilograms and measures about one hundred five to one hundred thirty centimetres without counting a tail that can add up to seventy centimetres. Front feet carry four toes; hind feet keep five, each tipped with shovel-like nails. Instead of ordinary pulp cavities, each tooth packs hexagonal tubes of vasodentin bound by cementum. The snout ends in a mobile disc and houses nine to eleven turbinate bones—more than dogs—plus nine olfactory bulbs, a hardware suite for sniffing out insect nests. A muscular stomach region acts like a gizzard, so chewing is unnecessary.
Range covers much of the southern two-thirds of Africa wherever savanna, grassland, woodland, or bushland offers ants and termites and rock does not block digging. Animals rest in dark burrows by day and may forage across home ranges of ten to thirty kilometres, often skipping the same path for five to eight days so nests can recover. The only fruit in the diet is the aardvark cucumber, whose seeds gain fertility after a gut passage and sprout in loose soil near burrows. Captives have lived up to twenty-three years; wild ears stay tuned for lions, leopards, hyenas, and pythons.
Source: Aardvark
