November 1, 2025 • 42 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss various demonic and godly hogs from global traditions, as well as one particular real-life hell pig that emerges from the fossil record. (Part 2 of 2) (originally published 10/29/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have a
vault episode for you. This is going to be The
Hogs of Hell Part two. It originally published ten twenty nine,
twenty twenty four. Let's jump right in. And Arthur went
as far as esquier Orvo in Ireland, to the place
where the boar Troweth was with his seven young pigs,
(00:28):
and the dogs were let loose upon him from all sides.
That day until evening, the Irish fought with him. Nevertheless,
he laid waste the fifth part of Ireland. And on
the day following the household of Arthur fought with him,
and they were worsted by him and got no advantage.
And the third day Arthur himself encountered him, and he
(00:49):
fought with him nine nights and nine days, without so
much as killing even one little pig. The warriors inquired
of Arthur what was the origin of that swine, and
he told them that he was once a king, and
that God had transformed him into a swine for his sins.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our Halloween season series called Hogs of Hell.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
In the previous episode, we focused mostly on mythology and fiction,
looking at a glorious assortment of monster pigs, beelze bores,
and also a few rather benevolent divine suiform beings of
various types. So in terms of specific examples, we talked
about everything from the vicious, shaggy, froth jawed Aromanthian boar
(01:52):
which was captured by Hercules in Greek myth to the
noble and heroic pig featured incarnation of the Hindu god
vision Sew, who retrieves the earth when it is rolled
up and stolen away to the ocean depths by a
great demon. And here we are again today to keep
the monster pig parade on the March.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
And indeed, in the last episode we did talk a
little bit about King Arthur battling various bores across the
British Isle, so I wanted to at the top of
this episode throwing just a little quote that gives you
a taste of that, though it doesn't really reference all
the gorings that also take place.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah. I like how it says the warriors were like, hey, Arthur,
we've been fighting this pig and it's worsting us. I
don't know if it was like different than being bested
by a pig, to be worsted by a pig, but
it's besting all the nights. And they're like, Arthur, where
did this pig come from? And Arthur is like, well,
this pig was once a king, but he was a
bad king, not like me.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I have to question his management style a little bit
for not like fully briefing everyone on the nature of
these boors. Was he just like, Hey, we're gonna go
wage war against pigs for a few months here, and
they're like, okay, sure, that sounds like a reasonable thing
to do.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Yeah, why not? Anyway, I wanted to kick things off
today by turning to the world of palaeontology, because it
so happens. You do not have to go into mythology
and fiction to meet some blood curdling monster pigs or perhaps,
to be more accurate, maybe not pigs but blood curdling
(03:26):
monster hoofed mammals with some pig like features. Well, hash
out what's really a pig? And what's not as we
go along. But the point is, if you go back
maybe twenty thirty million years into the fossil record, you
will encounter a branch of the mammal family tree that
has been affectionately nicknamed the hell pigs and perhaps less tastefully,
(03:49):
the terminator pigs. That's got to be a subsequent nickname there.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Right, yeah, yeah, I don't know how clinical that is.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Now. Hell pigs is just a cute name that has
been used in popular media. I found earlier sources from
the nineteen twenties which refer to the same class of
animals by calling them giant pigs. In scientific nomenclature, these
creatures we're going to be talking about are called antilodonts
e nte l odnt intilodonts. They belong to the family Intilodontidy,
(04:24):
which is now completely extinct. The family name comes from
the Greek intellus, meaning complete or perfect, and odon, meaning tooth,
so the antilodont is the beast of the perfect tooth,
or the beast of the complete tooth. The antilodont family
is a member of the order Arteodactyla, which for much
(04:46):
of scientific history were known as the even toed ungulates
ungulates meaning a hoofed animal even toad ungilates, referring to
the fact that most branches of this order bear their
weight primarily on two toes per foot. Now, despite the
historical classification based on this feature, more recent research has
(05:06):
shown that not all of the animals in this branch
of mammalia are actually ungulates or hoofed animals as traditionally understood.
So Ardiodactyls today consist of more well known ungulates like deer, bison, cattle, sheep,
and goats, but also camels, pigs, giraffes, hippopotamuses, and maybe
(05:27):
most surprisingly, whales and dolphins, because remember, whales evolved from
animals that used to live entirely on land and millions
of years ago, made the gradual adaptive transition to more
and more water based lifestyle and physiology over time, until
eventually they were fully water dwelling creatures. Having come, you
(05:48):
began as fish, moved onto the land, become mammals, and
then moved back into the water.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, quite a journey.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
In telodonts, the so called hell pigs first show up
in the fossil reccred sometime in the middle of the
Eocene epoch, which began roughly fifty five million years ago,
placing it about ten million years after the extinction of
the non avian dinosaurs, and continued until about thirty four
million years ago. I don't know if this has been
(06:15):
superseded by any more recent fossil finds, but at least
for a while, it was thought that antilodonts first appeared
in the area that is now Mongolia and then spread
across the globe. First spread across much of Asia and
then to North America and Europe as well, and numerous
species of antilodonts thrived during the Oligocene epic, and then
(06:37):
they appeared to have died out in the early Miocene
between nineteen and sixteen million years ago. So one thing
that's worth emphasizing is that we're not talking about one
specific species of animal. We're talking about this family. So
there were many different species of antilodonts. The largest were
probably according to now I've come across different estimates here.
(07:00):
According to the estimate given by Encyclopedia Britannica, they could
maybe get nine hundred kilograms. Britannica compares this to a
Clydesdale horse, so you can picture giant fanged pigs pulling
the Budweiser wagon. The largest known genus of Antilodont is
confusingly known by several different names, primarily Dinohias di n
(07:23):
o h y us, which means terrible pig or monstrous
pig from the same formation that you get dinosaur, you know,
terrible reptile, but then also is known as Deodon daeod
n which means hostile tooth. It took me a while
to figure out what was going on here, but it
seems that the type species in question here is known
(07:47):
as either Dinohias hollandi or Diodon shoshonensis, and these are
designations based on different fossil finds, but I think most
experts agree that they refer to the animals. So Dinohias
hollandy is a full skeleton found at Agate Spring's Fossil
Quarry in Nebraska, whereas Diodon was a genus that was
(08:10):
established earlier on the basis of less complete fossil remains.
So it gets kind of confusing because you will find
references to both names used separately in different sources. But
as best I can tell, these are probably the same
genus or the same species, whatever you call them, Diodon
or Dinohias. These animals were magnificent, with huge, devastating, awe
(08:34):
inspiring skulls and rob I have attached some images for
you to look at in the outline here, folks at home,
if you want to try to google a Dinohias or
Diodon skull, you can do that yourself, but I'll for
the people who can't look it up, I will describe
it as best I can. For the full skeleton, imagine
a body that looks kind of like a buffalo or
(08:57):
a rhinoceros, with raised neural fines over the backbone at
the shoulder, kind of like a suspension bridge, implying this
massive shoulder hump at the base of the neck to
hold up an enormous head. And it did have an
enormous head, the huge, deep, powerful jaws under a long
(09:17):
snout with canines that somehow look like both sharpened fangs
and crushingly thick blunt bats at the same time. The
skull could be huge, could be up to ninety centimeters long,
or about thirty five or maybe even forty five percent
of the total body length. So this is a big,
(09:38):
powerful animal with a big, powerful skull a crushing bite.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yeah, I mean you almost get the sense of it
being like the combination of a of a bear and
a horse. You know, it's kind of like the fierceness
of a bear skull, but far like thicker and longer.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We're gonna have to keep all of the different cross
between analogies going. There will be a number of them
as we go through. But one thing I wanted to
point out for you, Rob is if you look around
on the skull of this animal, you will see not
just teeth, but these strange little solid knobs of bone
poking out at several places from the bone of the skull.
(10:18):
So they're not teeth, they're like say along the bottom
of the jaw, under the lower jawbone, or behind the eye.
On the upper part of the skull, they will have
these protrusions. They just like parts of the bone that
stick out, almost as if they're like, you know, something's
going to be hanging from them.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
I was thinking it's almost like the animal's head is
like a rock climbing wall. It's got little, you know,
handholds and stuff on it.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, a lot of nooks and crannies.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah, and so these protruding bone formations may have had
a couple of different purposes, perhaps defensive in nature, but
also possibly related to increasing the power of muscles that
worked the jaw and the head. Again, this creature had
a powerful bite. It could chew you up and maybe
bite you in half. So the daton would have stood
(11:06):
probably a little under two meters tall at the shoulder.
I already gave one weight estimate earlier, the nine hundred kilograms.
It's not known for sure how much mass would have
attached to the skeleton, but even if you go down
from the nine hundred kilograms estimate that they cite in Britannica,
other sources guests around seven hundred and fifty kilograms, And
(11:27):
for comparison, that is bigger than most estimates you get
for adult male brown bears. So, whether you're in the
Clydesdale territory or just like surpassing the large brown bear class,
it should put respect for nature's power into your brain
and in dear blood. Here and at the same time
that you're looking at this skull, if you go back
(11:48):
and look at the legs, they don't look like something
that really fits with the skull. This is a hoofed mammal,
and the legs actually appear fairly slender. And so the
pairing of this amazing, frightening skull and mouth with the
fact that its feet are hooved and that its legs
(12:10):
almost look kind of like deer legs or something something
we associate with prey animals, animals that humans hunt and
eat or domesticate and use for milk and work. The
feet and the legs do not look like those of
wild beasts that could probably chomp us in half. So
should we think of in telodonts as predators? We can
(12:30):
come back to that question now to pivot a bit
and go on a short tangent away from the overtly
crushingly horrifying, I want to shift to the uncanny, the creepy,
the unwholesome and unnatural. So Rob, I've got a link
for you to look at here. I've also got an
image in the outline for you. Again, I will try
to describe for you folks at home so you can
(12:51):
picture it as well. But the thing we're about to
look at here is actually a sculpture. It is a
sculpture of the animal we have just been talking about,
and it is held in the collection of the Carnegie
Museum of Natural History. You can find a picture of
it easily if you search for Carnegie din Ohias. I
want to give a shout out that I found out
(13:12):
about this sculpture by reading a Carnegie Museum blog post
from January twenty nineteen by a collection assistant for the
section of Vertebrate Paleontology named Joe Sauchak. So this sculpture
was created in nineteen oh nine by an American artist
named Theodore Augustus Mills, who lived from eighteen thirty nine
(13:33):
to nineteen sixteen. Mills worked for a number of institutions,
including the Smithsonian and the Carnegie Museum, and was the
son of sculptor Clark Mills, who famously made a cast
of the face of President Abraham Lincoln in eighteen sixty five,
which a younger Theodore assisted with. But this din Ohias
sculpture is perhaps an art movement unto itself. A Sawchak
(13:57):
writes that as a powerful and amazing as the Deodon
or Dinahias bones are quote to several members of the
Vertebrate Paleontology staff, including myself, the model lovingly known as
the highest is perhaps even more horrifying than the actual
creature itself. So Rob, I've got the photo in here
for you to look at, alongside a headshot of Peter Lorrie,
(14:20):
just for reference. And so the author of this blog
post tries to identify exactly what the museum staff finds
so creepy and fascinating about the sculpture. He mentioned something
about the eyes that seems especially human and emotive. But
I do have to agree there is something really special
about this piece of three dimensional paleo art. It is
(14:44):
at once alien and disturbingly human. I think parts of
it are hitting Uncanny Valley territory because we're getting sort
of like a pig, giant pig horse with human eyes energy.
But also it looks like it's about to tell me something,
like it's about to tell me a secret, and it's
a secret I don't want to know, and it's grinning
(15:07):
because it knows that I don't want to know.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Oh yeah, I mean, it's definitely looking at me. It's
definitely looking at me. I feel like, to some degree
judging me, but judging me fairly, judging like it is
making a fair assessment of me. And yes, to your point,
perhaps I don't really want to hear it, but maybe
I do want to hear it. Maybe what this creature
has to share with me will bring a lot of
(15:29):
positive change into my life.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Oh okay, well I like the open mindedness with which
you're approaching this creature.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Maybe maybe the thing, the secret that is going to
share is actually great wisdom. It's wisdom you need and
you just aren't ready to accept.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
But I do not get the sense that it wants
to eat me. I get the sense that it is
a bit more benign when it comes to matters of
the flesh.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
It's really funny to me how much this paleo art image,
with the you know, the fully concer diructed image, with
its kind of serene, placid eyes gazing into your mind
and maybe hypnotizing you maybe you're about to do some
scanners stuff on you, how much that does not comport
with the just the fierceness suggested by the bones.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
This is often the case, though, isn't it. I mean
one of the prime exit I mean, the main prime
example here would of course be the human skull. You
get a totally different vibe looking at a human skull,
looking at a human face. But you know, that's almost
to be expected because you also have to confront a
lot about your own mortality. When you look at a
skull of a human. I think it's more pronounced when
you see I think that the other readily available example
(16:39):
is the skull of the horse. Like the horse is
a domesticated animal that many judge to be you know,
basically in the same realm as that of the dog
in terms of human animal relationships. You know, it is
an animal that is very close to us, and ultimately
there's a strong case to be made that it's it's
(17:00):
more essential to the development of human civilization than anything
any other animal that we've domesticated. But while we look
at a horse, you know, we tend to see something again,
more benign, a friend of humanity, something noble and proud,
beautiful even, But you look at the skull of the
(17:21):
horse and you get this sense of kind of a
grinning demon. And people have, you know, had I think,
similar connections with the skull of the horse for ages,
you know, often incorporating it into designs of supernatural beings,
or utilizing the horse skull in some way that is
you know, magical, perhaps protective magic and so forth. And
(17:46):
I don't know. I guess maybe it is easy to
lose sight of that when you're dealing with the skeletal
remains of a prehistoric organism in which we don't know
what the fleshed version of the face looked like. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Yeah, And this is a great reminder of something we've
talked about on the show before about how you know
paleo art is necessarily to some extent and interpretive enterprise.
In some cases you have more than just the bones,
But in a lot of cases you just have fossils,
maybe not even a complete skeleton. But you know, even
if you do have a complete near complete fossil skeleton,
(18:21):
that doesn't necessarily tell you what the soft tissue looked
like on the outside. So you know, you can have
ways of informing the guesses made like paleo art can
be informed by scientific knowledge, but you're still having to
make some guesses. You're having to make some leaps.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Didn't we discuss my memories a little foggy on this,
But didn't we discuss some examples of like intentionally bad
paleo art reconstructing existing organisms like living organisms.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
I think I recall what you're talking about, and I
think we were talking about the quote shrink wrapping phenomenon
where it's like a lot of extinct animals or just
you take the bones and then you imagine skin tightly
wrapped around those bones and cutting out a lot of
the kind of bulk or soft tissue that you actually
see on some animals. And so yeah, I think the
(19:11):
idea was taking the skeletons of animals we know today
and cutting out all of the excess soft tissue and
just shrink wrapping them.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Okay, I think that that is what I was thinking of.
But it's easy to take that idea of the shrink wrapping.
Look at say a horse skeleton, and then imagine like
the shrink wrapped paleo art version of an extant horse.
You know, it would be this nightmare steed, you know.
And I mean you could apply something similar to humans.
We would all look like some sort of a ghoule. Right.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yeah, Well, anyway, I do want to admit that, you know,
I don't have enough expertise in the anatomy or physiology
of these extinct mammals to judge whether the Carnegie the
Carnegie Museum statue is I don't know is anywhere close
to right or not, But there is one one thing
(20:00):
that I thought was interesting about it, which is that
the overly human eyes do kind of connect to an
interesting scientific fact about the antilodonts, which is that they
had more forward facing eye placement than a lot of ardiodactyls,
which raises questions about their survival strategies. On a lot
of hoofed mammals, you will see the eyes the eyes
(20:22):
spread more to the sides, which does that can be helpful,
especially to prey animals, because it gives them a wider
field of vision, so it's easier for them to see
predators approaching. But the more forward shifted gaze of the
antilodonts suggests some other pressures in play. Oh and just
quickly for contrast on paleo art for these hellpigs, I
(20:42):
wanted to attach a couple more images for you to
look at. They both look pretty interesting. One is one
I've just seen floating around the Internet sit at a
few different times. One is I think seemingly associated with
the Encyclopedia Britannica resources And that one is funny to
me because it looks like a crocodile horse pig with
face spikes doing the meme troll face.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I mean, it's very toothy. It looks like, how is
this mouth supposed to shut? It kind of implies an
organism that cannot close its mouth all the way. It
just has monster jaws.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Well that's another funny thing. Where so it looks hilarious
in the picture this way, because it looks like this
animal is laughing at me, laughing at my misfortune and grief.
But there is an interesting thing about these the antilidonts,
which is that they could apparently open their jaws extremely wide.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Well that makes me feel worse.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, So I wanted to come back to the question
are these animals really pigs? They have been called hell
pigs in popular media and books and articles, but apparently
this is probably not exactly accurate. Pigs, swine, and hogs
(22:02):
are animals that belong to the mammal family Suidy. And
while the antilodonts do share some morphological features in common
with pigs, like it's not hard to see with some
of these remains why someone would look at them and say, oh,
this is some type of giant pig, Like there are
pig like things about it, but more recent research has
(22:23):
shown that pigs are probably not the their closest relatives
in the ardiodactyl order, and in fact what their closest
relatives are is maybe even more interesting. So there have
been findings about this going back for years now. This
is not like a new discovery, but for an example
of a more recent paper supporting the division between antilodonts
(22:45):
and pigs, I came across This paper by Yang Yu, Hongyang,
Gao Chang Li, and Xijun Ni published in the Journal
of Systematic Paleontology in twenty twenty three, called a new
antilodont ardiodactyl Mammalia from the late scene of China and
its phylogenetic implications. This paper is a report on a
(23:05):
new genus and species of antilodontidy. This one is known
as Antilodontellus juliangi and it's and basically they say based
on finding remnants of the animal's lower jaw and then
comparing this animal to comparing this newly discovered antilodont to
(23:26):
other ardiodactyls, the authors conclude that the antilodonts are situated
within the clade Setancodonto morpha, which means that they are
quote more closely related to hippopotamus and cetaceans than to suena.
So the hell pigs are not pigs as we understand
(23:47):
them today, and are probably more distant cousins of pigs
and closer cousins of hippos and whales. So you have
this all inspiring body form in many ways rezen bling
a giant pig, but if you kind of crossed it
with a horse and a bison and one of the
monsters from Doom, and in fact it is more closely
(24:10):
related to hippos and whales.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
All right, the Doom creature in that like that pink guy,
that big pink one with oh it's.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Gotta be yeah, yeah, yeah, they had the invisible forms
as well.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yes, I believe that's the one, all right, all right,
So what we're we have here is maybe less of
a hell pig and more of a hell land whale
or hell hippo, or at least a cousin of those. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Yeah. Another scientific paper I was reading, one by Florent
rivals at All, described these animals morphologically as a cross
between a hippopotamus a giant pig and a carnivore. But
the hippopotamus connection is interesting because of that anatomical fact
that these animals tend to have jaws so made that
(24:55):
they can they can open them unusually wide, like more
than a I think the figure was more than one
hundred degrees. They can open them so like hugely wide
opening of the jaws, and hippopotamuses can do that as well.
Hippopotamuses famously have an extremely lethal and powerful closing bite.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, they have a very dangerous animal in the wild.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
So this brings us to the question of what did
these antilodonts eat, what and how did they eat? Antilodonts
are apparently different from a lot of other ungulates in
that their skull and jaw structure is in some ways
more like that of modern carnivores. Now, not in all ways,
but in some And it is worth noting that there
(25:38):
are no carnivorous hoofed mammals today, but there were hoofed
predators in the past. Could come back to this, but anyway,
if you compare the jaws of herbivorous hoofed mammals with
the jaws of carnivores, you will see some patterns. I mean,
different animals will have some idiosyncratic characteristics, but broad patterns
(25:59):
emerge in the teeth and the jaw shape. Carnivores often
need to have big skulls with powerful jaw muscles to
deliver a strong bite force, because they use their jaws
not just for chewing, but specifically for biting, to injure
and kill prey with the bite, and sometimes to fight
with each other. Herbivores not so much. Herbivores more often
(26:24):
have rows of flat teeth and jaws that are specialized
to move side to side for grinding down plant matter
between the molars. Carnivores tend to have sharp incisors in
the front of the mouth and jaws that primarily move
up and down, sort of less grinding oriented. Carnivores more
often have a jaw that hinges roughly in line with
(26:46):
the teeth, so it opens kind of like a claw.
Herbivores more often have an L shaped lower jaw that
hinges up above the teeth. So which of these patterns
do the antelodonts conform to? You know, if I had
looked at one of these daodon skulls with my untrained eye,
I would have guessed this was a fully carnivorous predator
(27:09):
if you look at the power of the jaw, the
shape of the front teeth, certainly the canines and incisors,
they look very sharp and threatening. They certainly seem like
meat eating predators on those counts. But the current consensus
of paleontologists seems to be that antilodonts had an omnivorous diet,
meaning they ate the whole buffet plants, animals, meat, vegetables,
(27:33):
whatever energy dense matter they could get into their mouths.
So one piece of evidence for this is the shape
of their molars and premolars. Antilodonts had what are called
bunadont teeth. This was a new term to me, I think,
but this means teeth with little hill shaped bumps on
the surface specialized for crushing a wide variety of foods.
(27:57):
So animals with bunadont teeth today include bears, pigs, and
some primates such as humans, all of which are omnivores.
There's also evidence from a number of other lines, things
like the wear patterns on fossil antilidont teeth. All these
tend to line up with an omnivorous diet, so it
seems they were likely eating from both the flora and
(28:20):
fauna all around them. And this is interesting because that
is also the case with modern pigs. Modern pigs you
don't usually think of as predators, but they will absolutely
eat some meat if they can get their hands on it.
Wild pigs and feral bores and stuff will eat small animals,
But they also eat a lot of vegetables, you know.
(28:41):
And so they have this kind of combination of traits
in the jaws and the teeth that show that they're
specialized for both. Really, and one thing is very clear
from looking at their mouths. The teeth and jaws of
most of these animals were capable of eating very hard foods,
cracking and crushing their way through anything including roots, nuts,
(29:04):
and of course plant matter, as well as meat and
possibly even bone. I found references to these animals possibly
being bone crushers in several sources. One al site is
the UCY Boulder Museum of Natural History in describing research
on a species of antilodont called Archaeotherium. This is an
(29:26):
extinct genus that once lived in the floodplains of North
America during the late Acene and the Oligocene and the
museum it compares the front teeth, the canines, the fangs
sort of of these animals to tusks and says that
you know, it may have been using these front teeth
to dig, essentially like to dig for tubers, to dig
(29:47):
for roots that it could eat. But they also have
evidence that this animal was into crushing bones with its teeth,
and they cite evidence of an ancient species of camel
called the Pobrotherium, which a bunch of the remains of
this camel were found in a fossil formation known as
the White River formation in Wyoming, where it looks at
(30:10):
least like they were killed or eaten at least by
these archaeotherium. And there are punctures on the bones that
apparently match the premolars of the antilidont species. Scars found
on the bones of hell pigs suggest that these animals
fought each other as well, apparently biting at each other's
(30:33):
heads and faces, resulting in deep bone scars. And that,
remember we mentioned earlier on the skulls of these animals
the protrusions of bone jutting out of the jaw and
then back behind the eyes they of course maybe an
anchor point for some of the facial musculature to help
the jaw operate the way it needs to, but as possible,
(30:54):
they also protected soft spots of antilidont faces during these
biting competitions to maybe protect the nose or the eyes,
And it does appear that these animals probably had a
strong sense of smell. Now there's another interesting question, which
is the debate about the meat that they likely ate.
So because there's this evidence in the way their bodies
(31:16):
are made, and of course in the remains of other
animals that antilodonts were running around eating meat, there is
of course a debate about how they got the meat
they ate to the extent that they ate meat in
their omnivorous diet. Were the antelodonts primarily active predators chasing
down in killing prey, or scavengers eating dead animals when
(31:38):
they came across them. And by the way, I think
it's worth noting that predation and scavenging are not mutually exclusive.
Most animals that engage in one will engage in the
other given the right opportunity. It's more a question of
specialization which they primarily do, and I've seen some paleo
experts comment that they think it quite possible that some
(32:01):
antilodonts would have been what you might call intimidation scavengers,
So to the extent that they were scavengers, it's possible
that some species would do this kind of activity where
you arrive at the site of a kill by another
predator and then you threaten and intimidate the original predator
into running away, and then the antilodont can steal the kill.
(32:25):
This is a strategy that some predators and scavengers employ today.
For example, a lion might wait for a cheetah to
chase down and kill an impala, and then the larger
lion comes and scares the cheetah away and takes the prey.
Now you might think, well, what if you're like a bigger,
more powerful predator, why wouldn't you just kill the prey
(32:46):
in the first place. But actually there are different specializations
in play. Like some predators might be faster moving and
easier to you know, it's easier for them to chase
prey that's actively trying to run away, whereas you might
not be as fast as the original predator. But the
original predator like can't drag its kill away fast enough
to get away from you if you're bigger and more powerful.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Yeah, the former is a game of stealth. The latter
is holding down turf, stealing territory and defending it. Adding
into the fact that the actual predators that made the
initial kill might be rather extinguished by the hunt. So yeah,
it's a huge opportunity for something like that to move
(33:30):
in and take advantage of the situation. And of course
there are various other versions of this we've talked about
in the show before, some involving human beings getting in
there and getting at least a piece of the kill
and then making off with it from the original predators.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Oh yeah, I know that's come up in the show before,
about humans as intimidation scavengers.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, yeah, some traditional human practices along those lines.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Yeah, so antilidants maybe not literally pigs, more pigs in
name only, but good enough as monster pigs for me.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like weighing everything we've discussed here,
it's like, it sounds like still a very intimidating organism,
one that you would want to probably keep a healthy
distance from, even if it was looking at you with
those kind of sweet Peter Laurie eyes. I guess even
more so if it's looking directly at you with with
front facing Peter Laurie eyes.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
I don't know why I'm not. I'm really not just
like playing it up for the show. Like I truly
am a little disturbed and unnerved by the idea of
being chased or preyed upon or threatened by a by
a toothy mammal that has hooves instead of paws and claws.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Yeah, why do you Why do you think that is
what makes it worse than say, being hunted by a
great bear. I don't, which I find to be extremely terrifying.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
Well, that is extremely terrifying, it is. I think it's
just that the hooves idea is it's unusual, like the
idea that you would you could like hear something that
sounds like kind of hoof beats. I mean, it wouldn't
be exactly like horse hoof beats, because you know, they
have different types of hoofs, you know, it's the it's
the two toad ungulate. But it would still be basically
a hoofed animal would sound like a pig walking around,
(35:16):
except it could bite you in half. I don't know,
it's freaky.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Reminds me a bit. I'm reminded here two of our
discussions of the horse in the past was it was
it stories of Julius Caesar's horse having human feet or
tell feet.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, maybe we'll have to rerun soon
our episodes on the evolution of horse hooves. I think
this kind of ties in somehow. Yeah, that one had
the less frightening but still quite jarring idea that in
an evolutionary sense, horses are galloping around on their middle fingers.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Yes, they just have finger feet, yeah, but still, you know,
the basic idea of the hell hog here, the fossil evidence,
I think does provide us with like a basic idea
of what some of these monster pigs might consist of.
You know, if they were a reality, Like if King
Arthur was actually battling a bunch of hell pigs that
(36:12):
used to be human kings they were too wicked to
remain in human form, Yeah, I could see it looking
something like this. You know, if the various other accounts
of monster pigs that we discussed, you know, if there
was some sort of primordial monster hog roaming the countryside, Yeah, yeah,
I could see it looking something like this, having eyes
(36:33):
like this even and maybe the eyes of the highest
that are disturbing because you can sort of imagine the
idea of, oh, this is like a human intellect staring
out at me through the body and the appetites of
a hellish pig.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
This king he has remorse for his sins, for the
sense he committed as king, and now he is doomed
spend eternity in the Big Bone Room of the Carnegie Museum.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
You know, two more cinematic connections to pigs and bores
that I want to mention here is because these might
be coming to mind for some of our listeners. First
of all, Wizard of oz Uh, there is the scene
where Dorothy almost falls in or does fall into the
pig pen, and there is concern that Dorothy is about
to be eaten by pigs.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Or at least injured by them. But yeah, I always thought.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
It would be like straight up eating down to the bone. Yeah,
it's kind of horrifying sequence.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I agree. You know that was scary as heck. I
remember that.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Yeah, And then I'm also reminded that there's a whole
plot line one of the main I guess part of
The main plot in Hannibal is that Mason Berger wants
to feed Hannibal Lecter to some wild bores. I forget
the exact details, but he's like, actually bred some big
monster bores to eat Hannibal Lecter.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
I think they're not wild boars, aren't they. They're like,
they're like domestic pigs that were selected to enjoy the
taste of human flesh.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Was that it? I knew there was some sort of
selective breeding, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't sure how Jurassic
Park it got. It's been a long time since I
read it, So it's like, if you had told me
it's like, oh, he used he used DNA from prehistoric
pigs and bores, I would be like, okay, sure, yeah.
I mean he's like super rich, and that is certainly
a novel of excess, So why not.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Like he, oh, yes, he cloned din Ohias hollandi or Deodon,
whichever is. Yeah, he cloned it to make a giant
pig so that it could come eat Hannibal Lecter's feet.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah. Yeah, Like that's not any wilder than anything it's
actually in the book, So I'd say, why not? Does
not work out? Spoilers for Hannibal book and film adaptation.
But yeah, they don't actually eat Hannibal. I think in
the movie they end up eating Mason, but I don't
think it goes down like that in the novel.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
Oh, in the book there's something even weirder. I think
he gets thrown into some eels or.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Something something like that. I don't think we can really
even go into all the detail what happens in the book,
but it's Yeah, I think it's worse in some ways.
But now I'm wondering if there are other like monstrous pigs,
sort of horror pig scenarios that we should bring up
but we haven't. Perhaps those four listeners will have to
(39:28):
jump in other Halloween related cinematic pigs, hogs, bores, and
so forth.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, send them our way, contact it stuff to blow
your mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, maybe Haveleen is even getting on the action that
I can't Haveveleena's don't really seem to have the same
like horror vibe. I don't know Ila was get a
sweeter vibe off of the Havelena, though I've seen some
pretty ferocious looking Hovelna heads mounted on the wall before
my uncle and aunt had the head of one that
they had killed on the wall of their s room,
(40:01):
and they had they also had this like, uh, this
reading light that had like a red plastic cover, so
it ended up casting like a hellish red glow on
the like snarling head mounted head of a hovelina, and
it created quite a scene, I think when when when
my son traveled out there with us, we ended up
(40:22):
having to do something to sort of alter the tableau
so it wouldn't be quite as terrifying to sleep at
the same room with it. Put a towel over it. Yeah, yeah,
put a towel over it, our hat on it. I
don't know what we did, maybe change the light out.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I don't know how you didn't start our series talking
about that.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
That's great, I know, I'd kind of kind of forgotten
about that real quick before anybody goes to correct me
on this. Haveleen is our pack reas. So they are
pig like like ungulates, but they are not pigs per se,
So a lot of people will call them pigs or
call them bores, and yeah, it's there, they're pig like.
(41:00):
I'll leave it at that, all right, Well, on that note,
we're going to go ahead and close out this look
at the Hogs of Hell, but again certainly write in
if you have more examples of Halloween hogs, be the fictional, prehistoric, science, fictional, mythological, folkloric,
whatever you've got, write in. We would love to hear
(41:22):
from you. We'll probably, you know well, inevitably do some
sort of a like a Halloween Hangover listener mail episode
at some point in November to go through additional stuff
that has come in related to our Halloween episodes. So
do write in.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
M
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have a
vault episode for you. This is going to be The
Hogs of Hell Part two. It originally published ten twenty nine,
twenty twenty four. Let's jump right in. And Arthur went
as far as esquier Orvo in Ireland, to the place
where the boar Troweth was with his seven young pigs,
(00:28):
and the dogs were let loose upon him from all sides.
That day until evening, the Irish fought with him. Nevertheless,
he laid waste the fifth part of Ireland. And on
the day following the household of Arthur fought with him,
and they were worsted by him and got no advantage.
And the third day Arthur himself encountered him, and he
(00:49):
fought with him nine nights and nine days, without so
much as killing even one little pig. The warriors inquired
of Arthur what was the origin of that swine, and
he told them that he was once a king, and
that God had transformed him into a swine for his sins.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our Halloween season series called Hogs of Hell.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
In the previous episode, we focused mostly on mythology and fiction,
looking at a glorious assortment of monster pigs, beelze bores,
and also a few rather benevolent divine suiform beings of
various types. So in terms of specific examples, we talked
about everything from the vicious, shaggy, froth jawed Aromanthian boar
(01:52):
which was captured by Hercules in Greek myth to the
noble and heroic pig featured incarnation of the Hindu god
vision Sew, who retrieves the earth when it is rolled
up and stolen away to the ocean depths by a
great demon. And here we are again today to keep
the monster pig parade on the March.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
And indeed, in the last episode we did talk a
little bit about King Arthur battling various bores across the
British Isle, so I wanted to at the top of
this episode throwing just a little quote that gives you
a taste of that, though it doesn't really reference all
the gorings that also take place.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah. I like how it says the warriors were like, hey, Arthur,
we've been fighting this pig and it's worsting us. I
don't know if it was like different than being bested
by a pig, to be worsted by a pig, but
it's besting all the nights. And they're like, Arthur, where
did this pig come from? And Arthur is like, well,
this pig was once a king, but he was a
bad king, not like me.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I have to question his management style a little bit
for not like fully briefing everyone on the nature of
these boors. Was he just like, Hey, we're gonna go
wage war against pigs for a few months here, and
they're like, okay, sure, that sounds like a reasonable thing
to do.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Yeah, why not? Anyway, I wanted to kick things off
today by turning to the world of palaeontology, because it
so happens. You do not have to go into mythology
and fiction to meet some blood curdling monster pigs or perhaps,
to be more accurate, maybe not pigs but blood curdling
(03:26):
monster hoofed mammals with some pig like features. Well, hash
out what's really a pig? And what's not as we
go along. But the point is, if you go back
maybe twenty thirty million years into the fossil record, you
will encounter a branch of the mammal family tree that
has been affectionately nicknamed the hell pigs and perhaps less tastefully,
(03:49):
the terminator pigs. That's got to be a subsequent nickname there.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Right, yeah, yeah, I don't know how clinical that is.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Now. Hell pigs is just a cute name that has
been used in popular media. I found earlier sources from
the nineteen twenties which refer to the same class of
animals by calling them giant pigs. In scientific nomenclature, these
creatures we're going to be talking about are called antilodonts
e nte l odnt intilodonts. They belong to the family Intilodontidy,
(04:24):
which is now completely extinct. The family name comes from
the Greek intellus, meaning complete or perfect, and odon, meaning tooth,
so the antilodont is the beast of the perfect tooth,
or the beast of the complete tooth. The antilodont family
is a member of the order Arteodactyla, which for much
(04:46):
of scientific history were known as the even toed ungulates
ungulates meaning a hoofed animal even toad ungilates, referring to
the fact that most branches of this order bear their
weight primarily on two toes per foot. Now, despite the
historical classification based on this feature, more recent research has
(05:06):
shown that not all of the animals in this branch
of mammalia are actually ungulates or hoofed animals as traditionally understood.
So Ardiodactyls today consist of more well known ungulates like deer, bison, cattle, sheep,
and goats, but also camels, pigs, giraffes, hippopotamuses, and maybe
(05:27):
most surprisingly, whales and dolphins, because remember, whales evolved from
animals that used to live entirely on land and millions
of years ago, made the gradual adaptive transition to more
and more water based lifestyle and physiology over time, until
eventually they were fully water dwelling creatures. Having come, you
(05:48):
began as fish, moved onto the land, become mammals, and
then moved back into the water.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, quite a journey.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
In telodonts, the so called hell pigs first show up
in the fossil reccred sometime in the middle of the
Eocene epoch, which began roughly fifty five million years ago,
placing it about ten million years after the extinction of
the non avian dinosaurs, and continued until about thirty four
million years ago. I don't know if this has been
(06:15):
superseded by any more recent fossil finds, but at least
for a while, it was thought that antilodonts first appeared
in the area that is now Mongolia and then spread
across the globe. First spread across much of Asia and
then to North America and Europe as well, and numerous
species of antilodonts thrived during the Oligocene epic, and then
(06:37):
they appeared to have died out in the early Miocene
between nineteen and sixteen million years ago. So one thing
that's worth emphasizing is that we're not talking about one
specific species of animal. We're talking about this family. So
there were many different species of antilodonts. The largest were
probably according to now I've come across different estimates here.
(07:00):
According to the estimate given by Encyclopedia Britannica, they could
maybe get nine hundred kilograms. Britannica compares this to a
Clydesdale horse, so you can picture giant fanged pigs pulling
the Budweiser wagon. The largest known genus of Antilodont is
confusingly known by several different names, primarily Dinohias di n
(07:23):
o h y us, which means terrible pig or monstrous
pig from the same formation that you get dinosaur, you know,
terrible reptile, but then also is known as Deodon daeod
n which means hostile tooth. It took me a while
to figure out what was going on here, but it
seems that the type species in question here is known
(07:47):
as either Dinohias hollandi or Diodon shoshonensis, and these are
designations based on different fossil finds, but I think most
experts agree that they refer to the animals. So Dinohias
hollandy is a full skeleton found at Agate Spring's Fossil
Quarry in Nebraska, whereas Diodon was a genus that was
(08:10):
established earlier on the basis of less complete fossil remains.
So it gets kind of confusing because you will find
references to both names used separately in different sources. But
as best I can tell, these are probably the same
genus or the same species, whatever you call them, Diodon
or Dinohias. These animals were magnificent, with huge, devastating, awe
(08:34):
inspiring skulls and rob I have attached some images for
you to look at in the outline here, folks at home,
if you want to try to google a Dinohias or
Diodon skull, you can do that yourself, but I'll for
the people who can't look it up, I will describe
it as best I can. For the full skeleton, imagine
a body that looks kind of like a buffalo or
(08:57):
a rhinoceros, with raised neural fines over the backbone at
the shoulder, kind of like a suspension bridge, implying this
massive shoulder hump at the base of the neck to
hold up an enormous head. And it did have an
enormous head, the huge, deep, powerful jaws under a long
(09:17):
snout with canines that somehow look like both sharpened fangs
and crushingly thick blunt bats at the same time. The
skull could be huge, could be up to ninety centimeters long,
or about thirty five or maybe even forty five percent
of the total body length. So this is a big,
(09:38):
powerful animal with a big, powerful skull a crushing bite.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yeah, I mean you almost get the sense of it
being like the combination of a of a bear and
a horse. You know, it's kind of like the fierceness
of a bear skull, but far like thicker and longer.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We're gonna have to keep all of the different cross
between analogies going. There will be a number of them
as we go through. But one thing I wanted to
point out for you, Rob is if you look around
on the skull of this animal, you will see not
just teeth, but these strange little solid knobs of bone
poking out at several places from the bone of the skull.
(10:18):
So they're not teeth, they're like say along the bottom
of the jaw, under the lower jawbone, or behind the eye.
On the upper part of the skull, they will have
these protrusions. They just like parts of the bone that
stick out, almost as if they're like, you know, something's
going to be hanging from them.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
I was thinking it's almost like the animal's head is
like a rock climbing wall. It's got little, you know,
handholds and stuff on it.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, a lot of nooks and crannies.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah, and so these protruding bone formations may have had
a couple of different purposes, perhaps defensive in nature, but
also possibly related to increasing the power of muscles that
worked the jaw and the head. Again, this creature had
a powerful bite. It could chew you up and maybe
bite you in half. So the daton would have stood
(11:06):
probably a little under two meters tall at the shoulder.
I already gave one weight estimate earlier, the nine hundred kilograms.
It's not known for sure how much mass would have
attached to the skeleton, but even if you go down
from the nine hundred kilograms estimate that they cite in Britannica,
other sources guests around seven hundred and fifty kilograms, And
(11:27):
for comparison, that is bigger than most estimates you get
for adult male brown bears. So, whether you're in the
Clydesdale territory or just like surpassing the large brown bear class,
it should put respect for nature's power into your brain
and in dear blood. Here and at the same time
that you're looking at this skull, if you go back
(11:48):
and look at the legs, they don't look like something
that really fits with the skull. This is a hoofed mammal,
and the legs actually appear fairly slender. And so the
pairing of this amazing, frightening skull and mouth with the
fact that its feet are hooved and that its legs
(12:10):
almost look kind of like deer legs or something something
we associate with prey animals, animals that humans hunt and
eat or domesticate and use for milk and work. The
feet and the legs do not look like those of
wild beasts that could probably chomp us in half. So
should we think of in telodonts as predators? We can
(12:30):
come back to that question now to pivot a bit
and go on a short tangent away from the overtly
crushingly horrifying, I want to shift to the uncanny, the creepy,
the unwholesome and unnatural. So Rob, I've got a link
for you to look at here. I've also got an
image in the outline for you. Again, I will try
to describe for you folks at home so you can
(12:51):
picture it as well. But the thing we're about to
look at here is actually a sculpture. It is a
sculpture of the animal we have just been talking about,
and it is held in the collection of the Carnegie
Museum of Natural History. You can find a picture of
it easily if you search for Carnegie din Ohias. I
want to give a shout out that I found out
(13:12):
about this sculpture by reading a Carnegie Museum blog post
from January twenty nineteen by a collection assistant for the
section of Vertebrate Paleontology named Joe Sauchak. So this sculpture
was created in nineteen oh nine by an American artist
named Theodore Augustus Mills, who lived from eighteen thirty nine
(13:33):
to nineteen sixteen. Mills worked for a number of institutions,
including the Smithsonian and the Carnegie Museum, and was the
son of sculptor Clark Mills, who famously made a cast
of the face of President Abraham Lincoln in eighteen sixty five,
which a younger Theodore assisted with. But this din Ohias
sculpture is perhaps an art movement unto itself. A Sawchak
(13:57):
writes that as a powerful and amazing as the Deodon
or Dinahias bones are quote to several members of the
Vertebrate Paleontology staff, including myself, the model lovingly known as
the highest is perhaps even more horrifying than the actual
creature itself. So Rob, I've got the photo in here
for you to look at, alongside a headshot of Peter Lorrie,
(14:20):
just for reference. And so the author of this blog
post tries to identify exactly what the museum staff finds
so creepy and fascinating about the sculpture. He mentioned something
about the eyes that seems especially human and emotive. But
I do have to agree there is something really special
about this piece of three dimensional paleo art. It is
(14:44):
at once alien and disturbingly human. I think parts of
it are hitting Uncanny Valley territory because we're getting sort
of like a pig, giant pig horse with human eyes energy.
But also it looks like it's about to tell me something,
like it's about to tell me a secret, and it's
a secret I don't want to know, and it's grinning
(15:07):
because it knows that I don't want to know.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Oh yeah, I mean, it's definitely looking at me. It's
definitely looking at me. I feel like, to some degree
judging me, but judging me fairly, judging like it is
making a fair assessment of me. And yes, to your point,
perhaps I don't really want to hear it, but maybe
I do want to hear it. Maybe what this creature
has to share with me will bring a lot of
(15:29):
positive change into my life.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Oh okay, well I like the open mindedness with which
you're approaching this creature.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Maybe maybe the thing, the secret that is going to
share is actually great wisdom. It's wisdom you need and
you just aren't ready to accept.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
But I do not get the sense that it wants
to eat me. I get the sense that it is
a bit more benign when it comes to matters of
the flesh.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
It's really funny to me how much this paleo art image,
with the you know, the fully concer diructed image, with
its kind of serene, placid eyes gazing into your mind
and maybe hypnotizing you maybe you're about to do some
scanners stuff on you, how much that does not comport
with the just the fierceness suggested by the bones.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
This is often the case, though, isn't it. I mean
one of the prime exit I mean, the main prime
example here would of course be the human skull. You
get a totally different vibe looking at a human skull,
looking at a human face. But you know, that's almost
to be expected because you also have to confront a
lot about your own mortality. When you look at a
skull of a human. I think it's more pronounced when
you see I think that the other readily available example
(16:39):
is the skull of the horse. Like the horse is
a domesticated animal that many judge to be you know,
basically in the same realm as that of the dog
in terms of human animal relationships. You know, it is
an animal that is very close to us, and ultimately
there's a strong case to be made that it's it's
(17:00):
more essential to the development of human civilization than anything
any other animal that we've domesticated. But while we look
at a horse, you know, we tend to see something again,
more benign, a friend of humanity, something noble and proud,
beautiful even, But you look at the skull of the
(17:21):
horse and you get this sense of kind of a
grinning demon. And people have, you know, had I think,
similar connections with the skull of the horse for ages,
you know, often incorporating it into designs of supernatural beings,
or utilizing the horse skull in some way that is
you know, magical, perhaps protective magic and so forth. And
(17:46):
I don't know. I guess maybe it is easy to
lose sight of that when you're dealing with the skeletal
remains of a prehistoric organism in which we don't know
what the fleshed version of the face looked like. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Yeah, And this is a great reminder of something we've
talked about on the show before about how you know
paleo art is necessarily to some extent and interpretive enterprise.
In some cases you have more than just the bones,
But in a lot of cases you just have fossils,
maybe not even a complete skeleton. But you know, even
if you do have a complete near complete fossil skeleton,
(18:21):
that doesn't necessarily tell you what the soft tissue looked
like on the outside. So you know, you can have
ways of informing the guesses made like paleo art can
be informed by scientific knowledge, but you're still having to
make some guesses. You're having to make some leaps.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Didn't we discuss my memories a little foggy on this,
But didn't we discuss some examples of like intentionally bad
paleo art reconstructing existing organisms like living organisms.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
I think I recall what you're talking about, and I
think we were talking about the quote shrink wrapping phenomenon
where it's like a lot of extinct animals or just
you take the bones and then you imagine skin tightly
wrapped around those bones and cutting out a lot of
the kind of bulk or soft tissue that you actually
see on some animals. And so yeah, I think the
(19:11):
idea was taking the skeletons of animals we know today
and cutting out all of the excess soft tissue and
just shrink wrapping them.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Okay, I think that that is what I was thinking of.
But it's easy to take that idea of the shrink wrapping.
Look at say a horse skeleton, and then imagine like
the shrink wrapped paleo art version of an extant horse.
You know, it would be this nightmare steed, you know.
And I mean you could apply something similar to humans.
We would all look like some sort of a ghoule. Right.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Yeah, Well, anyway, I do want to admit that, you know,
I don't have enough expertise in the anatomy or physiology
of these extinct mammals to judge whether the Carnegie the
Carnegie Museum statue is I don't know is anywhere close
to right or not, But there is one one thing
(20:00):
that I thought was interesting about it, which is that
the overly human eyes do kind of connect to an
interesting scientific fact about the antilodonts, which is that they
had more forward facing eye placement than a lot of ardiodactyls,
which raises questions about their survival strategies. On a lot
of hoofed mammals, you will see the eyes the eyes
(20:22):
spread more to the sides, which does that can be helpful,
especially to prey animals, because it gives them a wider
field of vision, so it's easier for them to see
predators approaching. But the more forward shifted gaze of the
antilodonts suggests some other pressures in play. Oh and just
quickly for contrast on paleo art for these hellpigs, I
(20:42):
wanted to attach a couple more images for you to
look at. They both look pretty interesting. One is one
I've just seen floating around the Internet sit at a
few different times. One is I think seemingly associated with
the Encyclopedia Britannica resources And that one is funny to
me because it looks like a crocodile horse pig with
face spikes doing the meme troll face.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I mean, it's very toothy. It looks like, how is
this mouth supposed to shut? It kind of implies an
organism that cannot close its mouth all the way. It
just has monster jaws.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Well that's another funny thing. Where so it looks hilarious
in the picture this way, because it looks like this
animal is laughing at me, laughing at my misfortune and grief.
But there is an interesting thing about these the antilidonts,
which is that they could apparently open their jaws extremely wide.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Well that makes me feel worse.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, So I wanted to come back to the question
are these animals really pigs? They have been called hell
pigs in popular media and books and articles, but apparently
this is probably not exactly accurate. Pigs, swine, and hogs
(22:02):
are animals that belong to the mammal family Suidy. And
while the antilodonts do share some morphological features in common
with pigs, like it's not hard to see with some
of these remains why someone would look at them and say, oh,
this is some type of giant pig, Like there are
pig like things about it, but more recent research has
(22:23):
shown that pigs are probably not the their closest relatives
in the ardiodactyl order, and in fact what their closest
relatives are is maybe even more interesting. So there have
been findings about this going back for years now. This
is not like a new discovery, but for an example
of a more recent paper supporting the division between antilodonts
(22:45):
and pigs, I came across This paper by Yang Yu, Hongyang,
Gao Chang Li, and Xijun Ni published in the Journal
of Systematic Paleontology in twenty twenty three, called a new
antilodont ardiodactyl Mammalia from the late scene of China and
its phylogenetic implications. This paper is a report on a
(23:05):
new genus and species of antilodontidy. This one is known
as Antilodontellus juliangi and it's and basically they say based
on finding remnants of the animal's lower jaw and then
comparing this animal to comparing this newly discovered antilodont to
(23:26):
other ardiodactyls, the authors conclude that the antilodonts are situated
within the clade Setancodonto morpha, which means that they are
quote more closely related to hippopotamus and cetaceans than to suena.
So the hell pigs are not pigs as we understand
(23:47):
them today, and are probably more distant cousins of pigs
and closer cousins of hippos and whales. So you have
this all inspiring body form in many ways rezen bling
a giant pig, but if you kind of crossed it
with a horse and a bison and one of the
monsters from Doom, and in fact it is more closely
(24:10):
related to hippos and whales.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
All right, the Doom creature in that like that pink guy,
that big pink one with oh it's.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Gotta be yeah, yeah, yeah, they had the invisible forms
as well.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yes, I believe that's the one, all right, all right,
So what we're we have here is maybe less of
a hell pig and more of a hell land whale
or hell hippo, or at least a cousin of those. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Yeah. Another scientific paper I was reading, one by Florent
rivals at All, described these animals morphologically as a cross
between a hippopotamus a giant pig and a carnivore. But
the hippopotamus connection is interesting because of that anatomical fact
that these animals tend to have jaws so made that
(24:55):
they can they can open them unusually wide, like more
than a I think the figure was more than one
hundred degrees. They can open them so like hugely wide
opening of the jaws, and hippopotamuses can do that as well.
Hippopotamuses famously have an extremely lethal and powerful closing bite.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, they have a very dangerous animal in the wild.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
So this brings us to the question of what did
these antilodonts eat, what and how did they eat? Antilodonts
are apparently different from a lot of other ungulates in
that their skull and jaw structure is in some ways
more like that of modern carnivores. Now, not in all ways,
but in some And it is worth noting that there
(25:38):
are no carnivorous hoofed mammals today, but there were hoofed
predators in the past. Could come back to this, but anyway,
if you compare the jaws of herbivorous hoofed mammals with
the jaws of carnivores, you will see some patterns. I mean,
different animals will have some idiosyncratic characteristics, but broad patterns
(25:59):
emerge in the teeth and the jaw shape. Carnivores often
need to have big skulls with powerful jaw muscles to
deliver a strong bite force, because they use their jaws
not just for chewing, but specifically for biting, to injure
and kill prey with the bite, and sometimes to fight
with each other. Herbivores not so much. Herbivores more often
(26:24):
have rows of flat teeth and jaws that are specialized
to move side to side for grinding down plant matter
between the molars. Carnivores tend to have sharp incisors in
the front of the mouth and jaws that primarily move
up and down, sort of less grinding oriented. Carnivores more
often have a jaw that hinges roughly in line with
(26:46):
the teeth, so it opens kind of like a claw.
Herbivores more often have an L shaped lower jaw that
hinges up above the teeth. So which of these patterns
do the antelodonts conform to? You know, if I had
looked at one of these daodon skulls with my untrained eye,
I would have guessed this was a fully carnivorous predator
(27:09):
if you look at the power of the jaw, the
shape of the front teeth, certainly the canines and incisors,
they look very sharp and threatening. They certainly seem like
meat eating predators on those counts. But the current consensus
of paleontologists seems to be that antilodonts had an omnivorous diet,
meaning they ate the whole buffet plants, animals, meat, vegetables,
(27:33):
whatever energy dense matter they could get into their mouths.
So one piece of evidence for this is the shape
of their molars and premolars. Antilodonts had what are called
bunadont teeth. This was a new term to me, I think,
but this means teeth with little hill shaped bumps on
the surface specialized for crushing a wide variety of foods.
(27:57):
So animals with bunadont teeth today include bears, pigs, and
some primates such as humans, all of which are omnivores.
There's also evidence from a number of other lines, things
like the wear patterns on fossil antilidont teeth. All these
tend to line up with an omnivorous diet, so it
seems they were likely eating from both the flora and
(28:20):
fauna all around them. And this is interesting because that
is also the case with modern pigs. Modern pigs you
don't usually think of as predators, but they will absolutely
eat some meat if they can get their hands on it.
Wild pigs and feral bores and stuff will eat small animals,
But they also eat a lot of vegetables, you know.
(28:41):
And so they have this kind of combination of traits
in the jaws and the teeth that show that they're
specialized for both. Really, and one thing is very clear
from looking at their mouths. The teeth and jaws of
most of these animals were capable of eating very hard foods,
cracking and crushing their way through anything including roots, nuts,
(29:04):
and of course plant matter, as well as meat and
possibly even bone. I found references to these animals possibly
being bone crushers in several sources. One al site is
the UCY Boulder Museum of Natural History in describing research
on a species of antilodont called Archaeotherium. This is an
(29:26):
extinct genus that once lived in the floodplains of North
America during the late Acene and the Oligocene and the
museum it compares the front teeth, the canines, the fangs
sort of of these animals to tusks and says that
you know, it may have been using these front teeth
to dig, essentially like to dig for tubers, to dig
(29:47):
for roots that it could eat. But they also have
evidence that this animal was into crushing bones with its teeth,
and they cite evidence of an ancient species of camel
called the Pobrotherium, which a bunch of the remains of
this camel were found in a fossil formation known as
the White River formation in Wyoming, where it looks at
(30:10):
least like they were killed or eaten at least by
these archaeotherium. And there are punctures on the bones that
apparently match the premolars of the antilidont species. Scars found
on the bones of hell pigs suggest that these animals
fought each other as well, apparently biting at each other's
(30:33):
heads and faces, resulting in deep bone scars. And that,
remember we mentioned earlier on the skulls of these animals
the protrusions of bone jutting out of the jaw and
then back behind the eyes they of course maybe an
anchor point for some of the facial musculature to help
the jaw operate the way it needs to, but as possible,
(30:54):
they also protected soft spots of antilidont faces during these
biting competitions to maybe protect the nose or the eyes,
And it does appear that these animals probably had a
strong sense of smell. Now there's another interesting question, which
is the debate about the meat that they likely ate.
So because there's this evidence in the way their bodies
(31:16):
are made, and of course in the remains of other
animals that antilodonts were running around eating meat, there is
of course a debate about how they got the meat
they ate to the extent that they ate meat in
their omnivorous diet. Were the antelodonts primarily active predators chasing
down in killing prey, or scavengers eating dead animals when
(31:38):
they came across them. And by the way, I think
it's worth noting that predation and scavenging are not mutually exclusive.
Most animals that engage in one will engage in the
other given the right opportunity. It's more a question of
specialization which they primarily do, and I've seen some paleo
experts comment that they think it quite possible that some
(32:01):
antilodonts would have been what you might call intimidation scavengers,
So to the extent that they were scavengers, it's possible
that some species would do this kind of activity where
you arrive at the site of a kill by another
predator and then you threaten and intimidate the original predator
into running away, and then the antilodont can steal the kill.
(32:25):
This is a strategy that some predators and scavengers employ today.
For example, a lion might wait for a cheetah to
chase down and kill an impala, and then the larger
lion comes and scares the cheetah away and takes the prey.
Now you might think, well, what if you're like a bigger,
more powerful predator, why wouldn't you just kill the prey
(32:46):
in the first place. But actually there are different specializations
in play. Like some predators might be faster moving and
easier to you know, it's easier for them to chase
prey that's actively trying to run away, whereas you might
not be as fast as the original predator. But the
original predator like can't drag its kill away fast enough
to get away from you if you're bigger and more powerful.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Yeah, the former is a game of stealth. The latter
is holding down turf, stealing territory and defending it. Adding
into the fact that the actual predators that made the
initial kill might be rather extinguished by the hunt. So yeah,
it's a huge opportunity for something like that to move
(33:30):
in and take advantage of the situation. And of course
there are various other versions of this we've talked about
in the show before, some involving human beings getting in
there and getting at least a piece of the kill
and then making off with it from the original predators.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Oh yeah, I know that's come up in the show before,
about humans as intimidation scavengers.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, yeah, some traditional human practices along those lines.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Yeah, so antilidants maybe not literally pigs, more pigs in
name only, but good enough as monster pigs for me.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like weighing everything we've discussed here,
it's like, it sounds like still a very intimidating organism,
one that you would want to probably keep a healthy
distance from, even if it was looking at you with
those kind of sweet Peter Laurie eyes. I guess even
more so if it's looking directly at you with with
front facing Peter Laurie eyes.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
I don't know why I'm not. I'm really not just
like playing it up for the show. Like I truly
am a little disturbed and unnerved by the idea of
being chased or preyed upon or threatened by a by
a toothy mammal that has hooves instead of paws and claws.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Yeah, why do you Why do you think that is
what makes it worse than say, being hunted by a
great bear. I don't, which I find to be extremely terrifying.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
Well, that is extremely terrifying, it is. I think it's
just that the hooves idea is it's unusual, like the
idea that you would you could like hear something that
sounds like kind of hoof beats. I mean, it wouldn't
be exactly like horse hoof beats, because you know, they
have different types of hoofs, you know, it's the it's
the two toad ungulate. But it would still be basically
a hoofed animal would sound like a pig walking around,
(35:16):
except it could bite you in half. I don't know,
it's freaky.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Reminds me a bit. I'm reminded here two of our
discussions of the horse in the past was it was
it stories of Julius Caesar's horse having human feet or
tell feet.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, maybe we'll have to rerun soon
our episodes on the evolution of horse hooves. I think
this kind of ties in somehow. Yeah, that one had
the less frightening but still quite jarring idea that in
an evolutionary sense, horses are galloping around on their middle fingers.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Yes, they just have finger feet, yeah, but still, you know,
the basic idea of the hell hog here, the fossil evidence,
I think does provide us with like a basic idea
of what some of these monster pigs might consist of.
You know, if they were a reality, Like if King
Arthur was actually battling a bunch of hell pigs that
(36:12):
used to be human kings they were too wicked to
remain in human form, Yeah, I could see it looking
something like this. You know, if the various other accounts
of monster pigs that we discussed, you know, if there
was some sort of primordial monster hog roaming the countryside, Yeah, yeah,
I could see it looking something like this, having eyes
(36:33):
like this even and maybe the eyes of the highest
that are disturbing because you can sort of imagine the
idea of, oh, this is like a human intellect staring
out at me through the body and the appetites of
a hellish pig.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
This king he has remorse for his sins, for the
sense he committed as king, and now he is doomed
spend eternity in the Big Bone Room of the Carnegie Museum.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
You know, two more cinematic connections to pigs and bores
that I want to mention here is because these might
be coming to mind for some of our listeners. First
of all, Wizard of oz Uh, there is the scene
where Dorothy almost falls in or does fall into the
pig pen, and there is concern that Dorothy is about
to be eaten by pigs.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Or at least injured by them. But yeah, I always thought.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
It would be like straight up eating down to the bone. Yeah,
it's kind of horrifying sequence.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I agree. You know that was scary as heck. I
remember that.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Yeah, And then I'm also reminded that there's a whole
plot line one of the main I guess part of
The main plot in Hannibal is that Mason Berger wants
to feed Hannibal Lecter to some wild bores. I forget
the exact details, but he's like, actually bred some big
monster bores to eat Hannibal Lecter.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
I think they're not wild boars, aren't they. They're like,
they're like domestic pigs that were selected to enjoy the
taste of human flesh.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Was that it? I knew there was some sort of
selective breeding, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't sure how Jurassic
Park it got. It's been a long time since I
read it, So it's like, if you had told me
it's like, oh, he used he used DNA from prehistoric
pigs and bores, I would be like, okay, sure, yeah.
I mean he's like super rich, and that is certainly
a novel of excess, So why not.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Like he, oh, yes, he cloned din Ohias hollandi or Deodon,
whichever is. Yeah, he cloned it to make a giant
pig so that it could come eat Hannibal Lecter's feet.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah. Yeah, Like that's not any wilder than anything it's
actually in the book, So I'd say, why not? Does
not work out? Spoilers for Hannibal book and film adaptation.
But yeah, they don't actually eat Hannibal. I think in
the movie they end up eating Mason, but I don't
think it goes down like that in the novel.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
Oh, in the book there's something even weirder. I think
he gets thrown into some eels or.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Something something like that. I don't think we can really
even go into all the detail what happens in the book,
but it's Yeah, I think it's worse in some ways.
But now I'm wondering if there are other like monstrous pigs,
sort of horror pig scenarios that we should bring up
but we haven't. Perhaps those four listeners will have to
(39:28):
jump in other Halloween related cinematic pigs, hogs, bores, and
so forth.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, send them our way, contact it stuff to blow
your mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, maybe Haveleen is even getting on the action that
I can't Haveveleena's don't really seem to have the same
like horror vibe. I don't know Ila was get a
sweeter vibe off of the Havelena, though I've seen some
pretty ferocious looking Hovelna heads mounted on the wall before
my uncle and aunt had the head of one that
they had killed on the wall of their s room,
(40:01):
and they had they also had this like, uh, this
reading light that had like a red plastic cover, so
it ended up casting like a hellish red glow on
the like snarling head mounted head of a hovelina, and
it created quite a scene, I think when when when
my son traveled out there with us, we ended up
(40:22):
having to do something to sort of alter the tableau
so it wouldn't be quite as terrifying to sleep at
the same room with it. Put a towel over it. Yeah, yeah,
put a towel over it, our hat on it. I
don't know what we did, maybe change the light out.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I don't know how you didn't start our series talking
about that.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
That's great, I know, I'd kind of kind of forgotten
about that real quick before anybody goes to correct me
on this. Haveleen is our pack reas. So they are
pig like like ungulates, but they are not pigs per se,
So a lot of people will call them pigs or
call them bores, and yeah, it's there, they're pig like.
(41:00):
I'll leave it at that, all right, Well, on that note,
we're going to go ahead and close out this look
at the Hogs of Hell, but again certainly write in
if you have more examples of Halloween hogs, be the fictional, prehistoric, science, fictional, mythological, folkloric,
whatever you've got, write in. We would love to hear
(41:22):
from you. We'll probably, you know well, inevitably do some
sort of a like a Halloween Hangover listener mail episode
at some point in November to go through additional stuff
that has come in related to our Halloween episodes. So
do write in.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
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