An anteater that forages both in trees and on the ground, with a tail that can grip branches.
Its snout is long and narrow; the underside and tip of its gripping tail are hairless.
Southern tamanduas can have an entirely dark coat. In southern Ecuador, dark animals occur near yellowish animals without a dark chest marking.
A report published in 2019 assembled six melanistic records from Zamora Chinchipe and Morona Santiago provinces: three photographs from 2018 and three museum specimens collected between 2009 and 2016. Dark coats were documented both in the field and in preserved specimens.
At 00:58 on 9 March 2018, a camera photographed a dark tamandua in mountain forest near San Luis waterfall. At noon on 10 October, park staff encountered another dark animal on a road about 21 kilometres away. A yellowish animal was also directly observed roughly 1.7 kilometres from the first camera location. Strikingly different coats occurred in the same region.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
The 2019 southern Ecuador report included three tamanduas killed by vehicles: one photographed on a road and two subsequently deposited in museum collections. The authors highlighted road mortality and proposed using melanistic southern tamanduas as a flagship for local conservation.