In most mammals the tongue is anchored to a small bone called the hyoid, near the throat. Pangolins are different: their tongue attaches far back near the pelvis and last pair of ribs, with the resting length coiled inside a sheath that extends into the chest and abdominal cavity. Enlarged salivary glands near the sternum coat the tongue in sticky mucus for trapping insects.
Because of this anchoring, a fully extended ground pangolin tongue can exceed the animal's head-and-body length, reaching into termite galleries and ant tunnels that a shorter tongue could not access. Head-and-body length in this species runs roughly 30 to 35 centimetres, excluding the tail, and reported tongue extensions in pangolins generally reach up to about 40 centimetres.
Exact tongue measurements vary across studies and among the eight living pangolin species, and detailed anatomical data for the ground pangolin specifically come from a limited number of dissected specimens. A common misreporting conflates pangolins with anteaters, which have a superficially similar feeding tool but a different tongue attachment and are not closely related.