Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in nineteen ninety nine, researchers found what
Speaker 1: looked suspiciously like a meat cash. The Society for Vertebrate
Speaker 1: Paleontology had been given a report on a strange bone
Speaker 1: bed found near Douglas, Wyoming. Huddled together in a big
Speaker 1: pile were the fossilized skeletons of at least six different
Speaker 1: extinct North American camels. Compared to the humpbacked beasts of
Speaker 1: burden we know today, these were relatively small, about the
Speaker 1: size of domestic sheep. The skeletons at this particular site
Speaker 1: were deposited around thirty three point four million years ago.
Speaker 1: Many of the specimens had retained their heads, necks, ribcages,
Speaker 1: and front legs, but the back legs and hips. In
Speaker 1: other words, the camel's meaty hindquarters were missing. Oh what's more, distinctive,
Speaker 1: tooth marks riddled the bones. The evidence suggests that the
Speaker 1: pile of camel remains might have been a prehistoric meat locker,
Speaker 1: a cash where some predators had dragged and stored their prey.
Speaker 1: A look at the region's fossil record revealed that there
Speaker 1: was a killer beast alive back then whose teeth perfectly
Speaker 1: matched those gnarly bite marks. Its name is Archaetherium. Weighing
Speaker 1: an estimated six hundred pounds or about two hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy kilos, and measuring four and a half feet tall
Speaker 1: of the shoulder that's one and a half meters, this
Speaker 1: creature would have been a sight to see. It walked
Speaker 1: on cloven hoofs, Its legs were long and thin, There
Speaker 1: were bony knobs on its jawbones, and the animal's lengthy
Speaker 1: snout was full of crushing teeth. Archaeotherium belonged to a
Speaker 1: group of omnivores the patrolled Eurasia, North America, and Africa
Speaker 1: for millions of years. These were the terrifying inteledonts. Intelliedants
Speaker 1: have definitely won the awesome nickname sweepstakes. They're sometimes, if informally,
Speaker 1: called hell pigs or terminator pigs of porkine as these
Speaker 1: creatures might appear, though they're classified in a different taxonomical
Speaker 1: family than modern pigs. Opinions have varied over where they
Speaker 1: belong on the mammalian family tree. Everyone agrees that intellidants
Speaker 1: wore arteodactyls, the order that includes whales and all of
Speaker 1: the hooked mammals with an even number of toes, like camels, goats,
Speaker 1: and hippos. What's up for debate is their placement inside
Speaker 1: that group. Scientists used to think that pigs represent the
Speaker 1: intelliedant's closest living relatives, but that's no longer the consensus.
Speaker 1: A two thousand and nine paper concluded that these beasties
Speaker 1: were actually more akin to hippos and whales. A more
Speaker 1: than fifty intelligant species have come to light. The oldest
Speaker 1: that we're aware of rooted around China roughly thirty eight
Speaker 1: million years ago, shortly after the group made its way
Speaker 1: to North America. Early varieties tended to have short snouts,
Speaker 1: but within a few million years natural selection lengthened their
Speaker 1: upper and lower jaws. Though the intelligents started out small,
Speaker 1: huge ones quickly arrived on the scene. Archaethereum was one
Speaker 1: of the first truly large intellidonts, but by no means
Speaker 1: was it the biggest. As recently as eighteen million years ago,
Speaker 1: the Great Plains of North America were home to the
Speaker 1: towering Dayodon. At its shoulder this animal stood just under
Speaker 1: seven feet in height that's about two meters. Scientists think
Speaker 1: it could have tipped the scales at nine hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty pounds, or more so, over four hundred and thirty kilos.
Speaker 1: Daidon's head alone was three feet or a meter long.
Speaker 1: To support its weighty skull, the creature had powerful neck
Speaker 1: muscles connected to arches on the vertebra in its shoulder area,
Speaker 1: so like a bison or white rhino, it may have
Speaker 1: had a visible hump on its back. Your typical inteledont
Speaker 1: mouth had a combination of long canine tusks and blunt
Speaker 1: cheek teeth. A no living mammal has quite the same
Speaker 1: arrangement of pearly whites. A. Judging by the anatomy of
Speaker 1: these snout and the bony surfaces where the jaw muscles
Speaker 1: would have been anchored, it's clear that inteloedants could open
Speaker 1: their mouths quite widely, and if the size of those
Speaker 1: muscle attachment points are any indication, the larger, long snouted
Speaker 1: hell pigs delivered powerful bites alike today's pigs and teleedants
Speaker 1: were almost certainly omnivores, aware marks on their teeth suggest
Speaker 1: the animals spent a lot of time gnawing on bones.
Speaker 1: Paleontologists speculate that inteloedants were efficient scavengers that probably took
Speaker 1: down live prey as well. Hard roots, eggs, fruits, and
Speaker 1: vegetation may have also played an importan role in their diets.
Speaker 1: But inteledant teeth weren't just reserved for meal time. Gouge
Speaker 1: like tooth marks have been found on some intelligant skulls.
Speaker 1: A puncture wounds and healed over scratches, sometimes measuring almost
Speaker 1: an inch or two centimeters deep, tell us that the
Speaker 1: animals occasionally fought by biting each other's faces. A few
Speaker 1: animals bear tusque injuries around their eyes. However, being able
Speaker 1: to intimidate your rivals is also an important skill for
Speaker 1: many territorial mammals. That might explain why so many intelligants
Speaker 1: had long, flaring cheek bones projecting from the sides of
Speaker 1: their heads. Another hypothesis is that these two were muscle
Speaker 1: anchoring points. In addition, numerous species possessed bony knobs on
Speaker 1: the undersides of their jaws that could have played roles
Speaker 1: in intimidation or one on one combat. The last intelligants
Speaker 1: died out about sixteen million years ago. No one knows
Speaker 1: why they when extinct, but the spread of new equally
Speaker 1: massive mam million predators could have had something to do
Speaker 1: with it, like the also now extinct bear dogs, but
Speaker 1: they're a different episode. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article scary prehistoric hell pigs once roam to the Earth
Speaker 1: on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Mark Mancini. Green
Speaker 1: Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
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