Last week I gave you this skull to have a go at identifying:

The skull of specimen LDUCZ-Z144 from the Grant Museum of Zoology
I thought that some of you would find it a bit easy, but the most diagnostic features aren’t visible in the image and it’s a nice specimen, so I went with it.
There is a bit of similarity with the skull of a ruminant, as noted by palfreyman14141, while Gerard pointed out that it’s from Africa and James M. Bryan was the first to drop a solid clue pointing to the correct species. As jennifermccaire says, it’s the very first on the list (assuming the list is alphabetical) – an Aardvark Orycteropus afer (Pallas, 1766).

An Aardvark (or as I prefer to call it, a Tippy-toes McSnuffleface) at Detroit Zoo. Image by MontageMan, 2008
Picking up on palfreyman1414’s observation about it looking like a ruminant, Allen Hazen asked an interesting question about the teeth, because the diet of these bizarre looking animals almost entirely consists of ants and termites, and most other mammals with a similar diet (like Pangolins and Tamanduas) have no teeth at all.
Making the presence of teeth even more weird is the fact that Aardvark stomachs have a muscular pyloric region that grinds up food in a similar way to a bird’s gizzard, so they really don’t need teeth for the major component of their diet. To top it off, the teeth of Aardvarks are utterly unlike any other mammal teeth – they’re made of tubules of dentine (giving the Order the name ‘Tubulidentata’), with no enamel, no pulp-cavity and no root – so they keep on growing:

The weird teeth of the Aardvark, made up of tiny dentine tubules.
All of this suggests that their dentition is distinctly non-standard, so it probably isn’t just a vestigial feature inherited from a toothed ancestor – which reinforces the importance of the question ‘why do they have teeth?’
Bear with me.
A 60-80kg mammal living in hot and water-scarce regions of Africa, will struggle to get enough moisture from ants and termites to survive, even if they are nocturnal and sleeping in burrows during the hottest part of the day. So how do Aardvarks do it?
Cucumbers, that’s how.
There is actually a species of cucumber that has a symbiotic relationship with Aardvarks, and it’s unimaginatively, but descriptively, called the Aardvark Cucumber Cucumis humifructus Stent, 1927.

Aardvark cucumber (not a golf ball). Image by B. Strohbach
These weird fruits develop deep underground and have a tough skin that keeps them viable for months. Outside they’re like a leather golfball, but inside they’re watery like the cucumbers you’d put in a Hendrick’s gin and tonic – and that’s where the Aardvarks get their moisture (the Cucumber, not the G&T).
Nothing but the Aardvark has a nose sensitive enough to detect the plant, or claws powerful enough to dig into the hard-baked earth to access the fruits (or possibly only an animal that mostly eats ants is desperate enough for some culinary excitement to go to all that effort for something that the rest of nature views as a lacklustre garnish). The Cucumber’s seeds need to pass through an Aardvark to become viable and those seeds get distributed underground with a healthy dollop of fertiliser in what is otherwise a harsh environment.
The leathery skin of the Cucumber is almost certainly the reason why Aardvarks have invested so much in teeth for a termite and ant-eating mammal. It also explains why those teeth grow constantly – and why they get so worn down.
I think that’s pretty awesome.
Now you may be wondering if I’m making all this up, but honestly, the world really is that weird (and wonderful) when you look at it closely enough!