An animal with two heads has given the internet a double-take.

A video of an exotic looking creature eating food has had more than 2 million views and plenty of comments from people scratching their heads in disbelief.

The animal has a brown head with a long nose and also a white fluffy head that looks like a panda or raccoon.

Watch the video and see if you can make head or tail of it before reading on to find out what’s really going on.

So yes, it’s a real creature.

And no, it doesn’t have two heads. But you’d be forgiven for thinking it does.

The animal is a Giant Anteater found in Central and South America. Its actual head is long and brown and on the left, and in the video it’s busy licking up ants. All pretty normal anteater behaviour.

The other “head” – the white fluffy one – is actually the anteater’s front left forearm! The angle and colouring makes it look like a second head with a black eye and nose area.

Take another look:

Giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), Copenhagen Zoo, Denmark, 2005 (Malene Thyssen, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons)

Still confused?

Here’s a video of one walking across the road, where you can clearly see the legs in action.

Glad that’s cleared up. And we weren’t the only ones confused.

Some people had some interesting theories about why an anteater would evolve to look like it had an extra head:

Seems like two heads ARE better than one!

Animals anteater illusion