Almost 200 years ago, a paleontologist found some completely improbable bones. They thought about it a thousand times, tried to find some sense in it; but everything ended in the same delirious image: that of a huge pig with the capacity to destroy everything in front of it.
And that’s what we called him for decades: the ‘pig from hell’.
What we have just discovered, two centuries later, is that we know almost nothing about them. Now they are even more terrible.
But what really is a ‘hell pig’? It is the popular nickname by which entelodonts are known; an extinct family of large prehistoric mammals that lived about 30 million years ago.
The bug was described for the first time in the 1840sbut it was in the early 20th century that paleontologists assumed it was closely related to pigs or peccaries. It was not something irrational: on a strictly physical level, entelodonts looked very similar to modern-day pigs.
Two meters tall, weighing more than a thousand kilos and jaws capable of crushing bones, but pigs nonetheless.
With “crushing bones” we are falling short. Recently, a team from Vanderbilt University could examine in detail the teeth of these animals and, thanks to three-dimensional models of dental microwear, they have managed to turn around everything we thought we knew about the role of these animals in North American ecosystems 30 million years ago.
Your conclusions they leave no room for doubt: “the largest specimens were capable of crushing bones with an efficiency similar to or even greater than that of lions and hyenas.” Luckily, they weren’t very smart; And, according to the researchers, “it has a brain-body relationship similar to that of reptiles, so they were very unintelligent creatures.”
A complex story. At first, experts thought that this monstrous animal was a born hunter. Then, partly because of this familiarity with pigs, they came to the conclusion that they were omnivorous animals, capable of eating small animals and carrion. Now, thanks to this team, we know that they were most likely at the top of the food chain of their ecosystems.
This, in fact, raises the possibility that different species (or subspecies) occupied different ecological niches.
However, there are curious things. To begin with, entelodonts have nothing to do with pigs. In fact, they are closer to whales and hippos than anything else. But, above all, it shows us the difficulties we continue to have in understanding our past.
Little by little, we are understanding that if our way of looking at the past conditions the futureour ability to understand what the world was like 30 million years ago will radically change many things we think we are.
And the best thing is that, even though I get melancholic and retrospective, everything we know makes it clear that the “pig from hell” is more infernal than ever.
Image | Carnegie Museum of Natural History
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