9 Animals With Misleading Names
A bearcat that's neither bear nor cat and a catshark called a dogfish are among some of our favorite scientific misnomers.
When Stephen Kolb Gilliland asked, “What do anteaters eat when they run out of ants?” Weird Animal Question of the Week got to thinking about animal names that don’t entirely fit the animal.
The four anteater species of Central and South America certainly scarf up lots of ants, but “they also love to eat termites,” as well as beetle and bee larvae, according to Mariella Superina, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Anteater, Sloth, and Armadillo Specialist Group. (Here are eight popular bugs that people should try eating.)
They're not only carnivores, either: A species of anteater called the southern tamandua regularly eats fruit in the wilds of Panama. Superina suspects the giant
