All Episodes

October 29, 2024 42 mins

In this 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)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And Arthur went as far as esquier Orvo in Ireland,
to the place where the boar Troweth was with his
seven young pigs, 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

(00:21):
Arthur fought with him, and they were worsted by him
and got no advantage. And the third day Arthur himself
encountered him, and he 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

(00:42):
a king, and that God had transformed him into a
swine for his sins.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two in our Halloween season series called Hogs of Hell.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
In the previous episode, we focused mostly on mythology and fiction,
looking at a glorious assortment of monster pigs, bielsa, 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

(01:33):
which was captured by Hercules in Greek myth, to the
noble and heroic pig featured incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu,
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 (01:52):
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 (02:11):
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 (02:33):
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 were like, okay, sure, that sounds like a reasonable
thing to do.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
Yeah, why not?

Speaker 3 (02:48):
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 monster hoofed

(03:09):
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 the

(03:30):
terminator pigs. That's got to be a subsequent nickname there.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I don't know how clinical that is.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
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 ntel od intilodonts. They belong to the family Intilodontidy,

(04:05):
which is now completely extinct. The family name comes from
the Greek intellus, meaning complete or perfect, and odon, meaning tooth,
so the antilidont is the beast of the perfect tooth,
or the beast of the complete tooth. The antilodont family
is a member of the order Artiodactyla, which for much

(04:27):
of scientific history were known as the even toed ungulates ungulates,
meaning a hoofed animal even toad ungulates, 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 shown

(04:48):
that not all of the animals in this branch of
mammalia are actually ungulates or hoofed animals as traditionally understood,
so artiodactyls today consist of more well known ungulates like
de bison, cattle, sheep, and goats, but also camels, pigs, giraffes, hippopotamuses,
and maybe most surprisingly, whales and dolphins, because remember, whales

(05:12):
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
began as fish, moved onto the land, become mammals, and
then moved back into the water. Yeah, quite a journey

(05:36):
in tilodonts. The so called hell pigs first show up
in the fossil record 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

(05:56):
superseded by any more recent fossil finds, but at least
for a while, it was thought that antilodants 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 antilidants thrived during the Oligocene epic, and then

(06:18):
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,

(06:40):
but 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 antilidont
is confusingly known by seven different names, primarily Dinohias d

(07:04):
n 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 daeodn, 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

(07:28):
known as either Dinohias Hollandi or Diodon shoshoneensis, And these
are designations based on different fossil finds, but I think
most experts agree that they refer to the same animal.
So Dinohias Hollandy is a full skeleton found at Agate
Springs Fossil Quarry in Nebraska, whereas Diodon was a genus

(07:50):
that was 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 SEP Britly 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,

(08:15):
awe 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

(08:37):
or a rhinoceros, with raised neural spines 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 snout with canines that somehow look like both sharpened

(09:02):
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, powerful animal with a big, powerful skull a
crushing bite.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, I mean, you almost get the sense of it
being like the combination 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 (09:36):
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.

(10:00):
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 (10:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (10:19):
I was thinking.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
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 (10:25):
Yeah, a lot of nooks and crannies.

Speaker 4 (10:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
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 in the head. Again, this creature had a
powerful bite. It could chew you up and maybe bite
you in half. So the dadon would have stood probably

(10:48):
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
for comparison, that is bigger than most estimates you get

(11:11):
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
and look at the legs, they don't look like something

(11:34):
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 hoofd and that its legs
almost look kind of like deer legs or something something
we associate with prey animals, animals that humans hunt and

(11:57):
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
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,

(12:22):
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
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,

(12:42):
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
about this sculpture by reading a Carnegie Museum blog post
from January twenty nineteen by a collection an assistant for
the section of Vertebrate Paleontology named Joe Sauchak. So this

(13:05):
sculpture was created in nineteen oh nine by an American
artist named Theodore Augustus Mills, who lived from eighteen thirty
nine 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,

(13:29):
which a younger Theodore assisted with. But this Dinohias sculpture
is perhaps an art movement unto itself. Sawchak writes that
as powerful and amazing as the Deodon or Dinohias bones are,
quote to several members of the Vertebrate Paleontology staff, including myself,

(13:49):
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 hedge out of Peter Lorrie, just for reference.
And so the author of this blog post tries to
identify exactly what the museum staff finds so creepy and

(14:10):
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 that it is at once
alien and disturbingly human. I think parts of it are
hitting Uncanny Valley territory because we're getting sort of like

(14:34):
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
because it knows that I don't want to know.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Oh yeah, I mean it's definitely looking at me. It's
definitely looking at many I feel like to some degree
judging me, but judging me fairly. Judge 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

(15:10):
positive change into my life.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Oh okay, well, I like the open mindedness with which
you're approaching this creature. Yeah, 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 (15:24):
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 (15:35):
It's really funny to me how much this paleo art image,
with the you know, the the fully constructed 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 the just the fierceness suggested by the bones.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
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

(16:20):
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 more

(16:41):
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

(17:02):
horse and you get this sense of kind of a
grinning demon. And people have, you know, had I think,
similar connections with the 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.

(17:26):
And 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.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, 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 an 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 a near complete fossil skeleton,

(18:02):
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.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
You're having to make some leaps.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
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 (18:31):
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

(18:52):
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 (18:58):
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 ghoul.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Right, 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

(19:41):
thing 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 antelodonts, which is that
they had more forward facing eye placement than a lot
of ardiodactyls, which raises questions about their survival strategies.

Speaker 4 (19:59):
On a lot of hoofed.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
Mammals, you will see the eyes the eyes 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 antelodonts suggests
some other pressures in play. Oh and just quickly for
contrast on paleo art for these hell pigs, I wanted

(20:24):
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, sited 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

(20:44):
meme troll face.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
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 (20:56):
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 antilidants,
which is that they could apparently open their jaws extremely wide.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
Well that makes me feel worse.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
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.

Speaker 4 (21:39):
Not exactly accurate.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Pigs, swine, and hogs 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.

(22:03):
But more recent research has 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 and pigs, I came across This

(22:27):
paper by Yang Yu Hong, Yang Gao, Chang Li, and
Xijun Ni, published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology in
twenty twenty three, called a new antilidont ardiodactyl mammalia from
the Late Eocene of China and its phylogenetic implications. This
paper is a report on a new genus and species

(22:47):
of antelodontity. This one is known as Antilodontellis Julianji 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 other ardiodactyls, the authors

(23:09):
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 them today, and are

(23:29):
probably more distant cousins of pigs and closer cousins of
hippos and whales. So you have this all inspiring body
form in many ways resembling 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 related to hippos and whales.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
All right, the Doom creature in that like that pink guy,
the big pink one with oh it's.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
Gotta be yeah, yeah, yeah, they had the visible forms
as well.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
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 4 (24:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
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 they

(24:36):
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 (24:55):
Yeah have a very dangerous animal in the wild.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
So this brings us to the question of what 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

(25:19):
that there 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

(25:39):
broad patterns 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

(26:04):
more often 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

(26:26):
line with 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.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
So which of.

Speaker 3 (26:37):
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 if you look at the power of
the jaw, the shape.

Speaker 4 (26:53):
Of the front teeth.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
Certainly, the canines and incisors, they look very sharp and threatening.
They certainly seem like me 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, whatever energy dense matter they

(27:16):
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 bunodont 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. So animals with bunadont

(27:39):
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 ware 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 fauna all around them. And

(28:03):
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, And so they have
this kind of combination of traits in the jaws and

(28:26):
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, and of course plant matter,

(28:47):
as well as meat and possibly even bone. I found
references to these animals possibly being bone crushers in several sources.
One out site is the Uicy Bowl Museum of Natural
History in describing research on a species of antilodont called Archaeotherium.
This is an extinct genus that once lived in the

(29:10):
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 for roots that.

Speaker 4 (29:29):
It could eat.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
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 least like they were killed or

(29:54):
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 heads and faces, resulting in deep

(30:17):
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, they also protected soft spots
of antilidont faces during these biting competitions to maybe protect

(30:41):
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.

Speaker 4 (30:53):
They likely ate.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
So because there's this evidence in the way their bodies
are made, and of course in the remains of others
their animals, that antilodonts were running around eating meat, there
is of course a debate about how they got.

Speaker 4 (31:06):
The meat they ate.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
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 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

(31:31):
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 antilodonts would have
been what you might call intimidation scavengers. So to the
extent that they were scavengers, it's possible that some species

(31:52):
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 antelodont can steal the kill. This is
a strategy that some predators and scavengers employ today. For example,
a lion might wait for a cheetah to chase down

(32:14):
and kill an impala, and then the larger lion comes
and scares the cheetah away and takes the prey. Now
you might think, well, well, if you're like a bigger,
more powerful predator, why wouldn't you just kill the prey
in the first place. But actually there are different specializations
in play. Like, some predators might be faster moving and

(32:34):
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 (32:50):
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 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

(33:11):
in and take advantage of the situation. And of course
there are various other versions of this we've talked about
on 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 (33:26):
Oh yeah, what, I know that's come up in the
show before about humans as intimidation scavengers.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
Yeah, yeah, some traditional human practices along those lines.

Speaker 3 (33:36):
Yeah, so antilo dants maybe not literally pigs, more pigs
in name only, but good enough as monster pigs for me.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
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 Lourie eyes.

Speaker 4 (34:08):
I don't know why I'm not.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
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 (34:26):
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 4 (34:35):
Well, that is extremely terrifying.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
It's 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 hooves, you know,
it's the it's the two toed ungulate. But it would
still be basically a hoofed animal would sound like a
pig walking around, except it could bite you in half.

Speaker 4 (34:58):
I don't know, it's freaky.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Reminds me a bit. I'm reminded here too 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 4 (35:13):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
Yeah, maybe we'll have to rerun soon our episodes on
the evolution of horse hooves.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
I think this kind of ties in somehow.

Speaker 3 (35:21):
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 (35:30):
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

(35:53):
used to be human kings they were too wicked to
remain in human form, Yeah, I could see it looking
so 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

(36:14):
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 (36:30):
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 (36:50):
You know, two more cinematic connections to pigs and bores
that I want to mention here because these might be
coming to my 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 4 (37:11):
Or at least injured by them. But yeah, I thought it.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Would be like straight up eating down to the bone. Yeah,
it's kind of horrifying sequence.

Speaker 4 (37:21):
I agree. You know that was scary as heck. I
remember that.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
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 specially bred some big
monster bores to eat Hannibal Lecter.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
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 (37:51):
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 (38:12):
Like he oh, yes, he cloned din Ohias Hellandi or
deoda on whichever is. Yeah, he cloned it to make
a giant pig so that it could come eat Hannibal
Lector's feet.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah yeah, that 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 (38:44):
Oh, in the book there's something even weirder. I think
he gets thrown into some eels or.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Something something like that. I don't think we can really
even go into all the detail what happens in the book,
but 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

(39:09):
jump in other Halloween related cinematic pigs, hogs, bores, and
so forth.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
Yeah, send them our way contacted stuff to blow your
mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yeah, maybe Haveleena is even getting on the action that
I can Haveveleenas don't really seem to have the same
like horror vibe. I don't know. I was get a
sweeter vibe off of the Havelena though. I've seen some
pretty ferocious looking Hovelina heads mounted on the wall before.
My uncle and aunt had the head of one that
they had killed on the wall of their guest room,

(39:42):
and they had they also had this like 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 my son

(40:02):
traveled out there with us. We ended up 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.

Speaker 4 (40:10):
Put a towel over it.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
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 (40:17):
I don't know how you didn't start our series talking
about that.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
That's great, I know I'd kind of kind of forgotten
about that real quick before anybody goes to correct me
on this. Halloween is our peck 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 they're pig like. We'll

(40:41):
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 right in
if you have more examples of Halloween hogs, be they fictional, prehistoric, science, fictional,
mythological folklore, whatever you've got writing in, we would love

(41:02):
to hear from you. We'll probably, you know, 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 (41:17):
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 (41:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

Stuff To Blow Your Mind News

Advertise With Us

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Robert Lamb

Robert Lamb

Joe McCormick

Joe McCormick

Show Links

AboutStoreRSS

Popular Podcasts

1. On Purpose with Jay Shetty

1. On Purpose with Jay Shetty

I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!

2. Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

2. Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.

3. The Joe Rogan Experience

3. The Joe Rogan Experience

The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2024 iHeartMedia, Inc.