CHAPTER XVIII
EDENTATES, OR TOOTHLESS MAMMALS
The animals which belong to this order are distinguished by having no front teeth, while some of them have no teeth at all. And in many other ways they are very curious and interesting creatures.
Sloths
The sloths live almost entirely in the trees, scarcely ever descending to the ground. Not only that, they walk along underneath the branches instead of upon them, suspending themselves by means of their great hooked claws. So they actually spend almost the whole of their lives upside down, with their backs toward the ground!
Yet they manage to travel along from bough to bough and from tree to tree with some little speed, and when there is a high wind, so that the branches are blown together, they will often wander for long distances. And they never seem to get tired, although even during the night they still hang suspended, just as they do during the day.
Sloths are very odd-looking creatures, and if you were to see one of them hanging from a bough in its native forests you would find it rather hard to believe that it was really an animal at all. For it looks much more like a bundle of twigs overgrown with lichens. And the strange thing is that it really is covered with lichens, which grow upon its long, coarse hairs just as they do on the twigs of the trees. These give the fur of the sloth a curious green appearance, which disappears soon after death, so that one never sees it in a stuffed specimen in a museum.
When a sloth is hungry, there is always plenty of food close by, for it feeds only upon the leaves and fruits and the tender young shoots of trees. And as there is plenty of moisture in these, it never requires to drink at all.
There are two different groups of these singular animals, the first consisting of those which have three toes on the front feet, and the other of those which have only two. They are only found in the great forests of Central and South America.
Ant-Eaters
Equally curious, although in quite a different way, are the ant-eaters, or ant-bears, as they are sometimes called, the largest of which is the great ant-eater of tropical America.