Imagine a giant hippo on steroids. Although this extinct creature’s scientific name is the four-hooved entelodont, it’s more commonly known as a “hell pig,” an accurate nickname for the wild-looking animal.
Hell pigs aren’t actually pigs but a relative of the hippo. The hell pig was six feet tall at the shoulders and weighed roughly 2,000 pounds. Its skull was about half the size of its body with a jaw that could open more than 90 degrees to gnaw its prey. Strange, bony projections grew from its skull. Its giant canines and molars could gnash food.
It appears hell pigs were omnivorous, meaning they ate leaves, fruits and nuts as well as meat. The hippo relative is one of a dozen “exceedingly rare” fossils found in a quarry in Maysville, near Cherry Point and Camp Lejeune off the North Carolina coast.
The fossils show how animals were distributed across the Earth in the Early Miocene period roughly 16–23 million years ago, according to a new paper in the Journal of Paleontology. Sean Moran, the paleontology and geology collections manager at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, is one of its authors.
Moran was part of a team that looked at a few dozen fossils recovered by professional and amateur paleontologists from the Belgrade Formation, a thin layer of rock full of preserved fossils. Many of the fossils they found are of teeth.
The Early Miocene period is important because it includes an interesting selection of mammals that roamed the area, including red pandas, rhinos and small horses (half the size of modern horses) as well as hell pigs.
The animals were able to travel across continents because low sea levels during a glacial period exposed the Bering Land Bridge, which physically connected Asia and Alaska.
“So, we start to see (in the fossil record) these Eurasian species show up in North America. For example, this is when we see the red panda show up in Nebraska, Florida and Delaware,” said Moran in an NC Museum of Natural Sciences article. “On the east coast we don’t have a great fossil record of these species outside of Florida, but our North Carolina information helps fill out the bigger picture of which Eurasian animals made it this far east.”
Hell pigs first appeared in southern Asia about 40 million years ago. They spread across Asia and Europe before crossing the Bering Land Bridge into North America.
“What we’re seeing in the past really does inform what we understand now and in the future,” said Moran. “These animals fill in gaps in the evolution of early horses and early rhinos, as well as red pandas that until a couple decades ago we didn’t even think existed in North America.”
Despite the name, we don’t know where the so-called “hell pigs” belong in the mammalian family tree. They walked on hooves, like pigs do, but had longer legs, almost like deer. They had hunched backs, a bit like rhinos or bison. But as is often, if not always, the case, there is some evolutionary method to this anatomical madness.
