ScienceMagazine recently featured a story on animals that resemble anteaters. A new study published in the journal Evolution explores the convergent evolution of mammals toward myrmecophagy—the specialized diet of ants and termites. This dietary trait has independently evolved at least 12 times. One possible explanation is the sheer biomass of ants and termites. In the rainforests of Central and South America, these insects are believed to outweigh all other insects, mammals, amphibians, and birds combined. Globally, termites alone are estimated to outweigh all wild mammals by a factor of ten.

Scientists knew that myrmecophagous—or ant- and termite-eating—mammals had evolved independently multiple times, from the anteaters of the tropical Americas to the unrelated pangolins and aardvarks living in Africa and Asia. The animals share ant-slurping adaptations such as long, sticky tongues, reduced teeth, and strong forelimbs for digging into insect nests. But until the new study, no one had investigated the diet’s evolutionary history in detail.

“The specializations associated with myrmecophagy are some of the most bizarre and fascinating among mammals,” says Laura Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University who wasn’t involved with the study. “This study illuminates our understanding of when, and how many times, these fascinating features evolved, and under what conditions.”

To fill this gap, Vida and his colleagues compiled data on the diets of nearly 4100 mammal species and then mapped those dietary classifications onto the mammalian evolutionary tree. The researchers’ model showed that since the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, myrmecophagy has evolved at least a dozen different times. They also found that myrmecophages have emerged across all three major divisions of mammal life, including marsupials and the egg-laying monotremes. “Things keep evolving into anteaters, somehow,” Vida says.