Mammals Evolved into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since Dinosaur Age, Study Finds (news.njit.edu)

You mean "i.e." I believe

While comparing things... a colony of leaf-cutter ants (which form some of the largest colonies with as many as 2 million individuals when the colony is mature) has roughly the same metabolic rate as cow (easily measured from the CO2 at the exits of their nest). So don't think of ants as tiny animals, think of ant colonies as fairly large animals.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it totally makes sense to adapt around that buffet

ant biomass is estimated to be 20% of human biomass, so it's remarkably close https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201550119

I think cockroaches might have something to say about this.

> At the end of all things, when evolution has reached its inevitable end, all that will be left is a war between ant eaters and crabs.

From reading the aritcle, it seems that ants are really crappy as an energy source:

  One thing myrmecophages share is an almost insatiable appetite — ants and termites are so low in energy that even a small animal like the numbat must eat about 20,000 termites a day

I think this explains why Anteaters spend most of their day doing nothing but sleep -- they barely get enough calories from eating ants.

Beyond ichthyosaurs and cetaceans, carcharhinification (shark-like convergent evolution) also occurred in plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, certain teleost fish like barracuda, and even the extinct thalattosuchian crocodylomorphs.

I guess we’ll see if they have the endurance. Sharks have been around for a while after all. But, Orca have surpassed sharks in terms of badassery, right? And it isn’t that close. They aren’t evolving into sharks, they are the upgrade!

The mosasaurs also developed a caudal fin (vertical, like sharks and ichthyosaurs, not horizontal like whales and dolphins) and eventually they became quite shark-like, though not as fish-like as ichthyosaurs.

Between ichthyosaurs (who evolved in Triassic) and mosasaurs (who evolved in Cretaceous) there existed also a group of marine crocodiles (Metriorhynchidae; who evolved in Jurassic), which also had caudal fins and were quite shark-like.

So there have been at least 4 groups of amniotes that looked like sharks, cetaceans among mammals and at least 3 groups of diapsids.

However all these marine predators looked like sharks from the point of view of locomotion, but none of them had the kind of teeth specialized for cutting that are characteristic for sharks. Teeth resembling those of sharks are found only among some other fish, e.g. piranhas, whose bodies do not resemble sharks.