The aardvark is a strange-looking creature
– to us, that is, no doubt it looks perfectly normal to other aardvarks. The
name is Afrikaans for “earth pig”, but it is certainly not a pig despite some
superficial resemblances. It does, however, do a lot of rooting about in soil
and termite mounds for its food, which consists of ants and termites.
One of the more remarkable things about the
aardvark is that it is a “living fossil”. When its mitochondrial DNA was
sequenced in 1999 it was discovered that the aardvark could be the closest
living relation to the first placental mammals that walked on planet Earth some
100 million years ago. It appears that its DNA has undergone hardly any change
during that time. This posits the idea that the earliest placental mammals
(i.e. not marsupials or monotremes) may have looked something like modern
aardvarks, but we cannot be certain of that.
Another finding that came from the DNA
analysis was that the aardvark is more closely related to the elephant than to
the anteaters of South America, despite occupying a similar ecological niche to
the latter.
© John Welford
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