So...A...aardvark (yes, I will explain.) Marcus and I were playing a game that involved pictures of animals...one of them was an aardvark, which we had to look up, because I had NO CLUE what it was (thank goodness for www.boardgamegeek.com, someone has posted a list of the animals...seemed odd, but handy!). So...for my "A" posting, I am posting some information about the aardvark, because it is wierd and topical to my life today.
From Wikipedia....
The Aardvark (Orycteropus afer) ("Digging foot") is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa. [1]. It is sometimes called "antbear", "anteater", "Cape anteater" (after the Cape of Good Hope), "earth hog" or "earth pig". The name comes from the Afrikaans/ Dutch for "earth pig" (aarde earth, varken pig), because early settlers from Europe thought it resembled a pig. However, the aardvark is not closely related to the pig; rather, it is the sole recent representative of the obscure mammalian order Tubulidentata, in which it is usually considered to form a single variable species of the genus Orycteropus, coextensive with the family Orycteropodidae. Nor is the aardvark closely related to the South American anteater, despite sharing some characteristics and a superficial resemblance.[2] The closest living relatives of the aardvark are the elephant shrews, along with the sirenians, hyraxes, tenrecs and elephants.
Edit: 4/2 @ 9AM...I thought to look up Aardvark in The Devils Dictionary and this is what I found..."an audacious creature chiefly remarkable for its length of tongue, fondness for ants, and precociousness in lexicons".
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