It has a broad rounded head, short face, large naked eyes, large hands, and long thin fingers with pointed claws, of which the third is remarkable for its extreme slenderness.
Its characteristics are exceptional tallness combined with slenderness and elegance of figure; a face somewhat long, without any special prominence of the cheekbones but having more or less oblique eyes; an aquiline nose; a slightly receding chin; largish upper teeth; a long neck; a narrow chest; a long trunk, and delicately shaped, small hands with long, slender fingers.
Scelidotherium is another genus of large South American Pleistocene ground-sloths, characterized, among other features, by the elongation and slenderness of the skull, which thus makes a decided approximation to the anteater type, although retaining the full series of cheek-teeth, which were, of course, essential to an herbivorous animal.
The East African gerenuk, or Waller's gazelle (Lithocranius walleri), of which two races have been named, is a very remarkable ruminant, distinguished not only by its exceedingly elongated neck and limbs, but also by the peculiar hooked form of the very massive horns of the bucks, the dense structure and straight profile of the skull, and the extreme slenderness of the lower jaw.
Especially in alligators the upper teeth overlap laterally those of the lower jaw, whilst in most crocodiles the overlapping is less marked and the teeth mostly interlock, a feature which increases with the slenderness of the snout.