Huge-Jawed 'Terminator Pigs' Unfairly Painted as Predators, Researchers Say - Gizmodo

New findings, published recently in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, shed a light on feeding habits of these strange, extinct mammals and some of their closest relatives, revealing clues about the changing world they inhabited.

There were also those vaguely piggish entelodonts: buffalo-sized rage swine with wide, winged cheekbones, barreling along on unnervingly athletic legs.

They’re like a combination of different animals,” said Florent Rivals, an evolutionary paleoecologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, citing features of entelodont skulls and teeth that resembled those of both pigs and carnivorous mammals.

Entelodonts seem to have a lot in common with omnivorous pigs, for example, but they’ve also been imagined as potential predators, prowling the woodlands and plains for vulnerable game like some kind of hooved grizzly.

To help clarify what entelodonts and anthracotheres actually ate, Rivals and his colleagues examined the fossilized teeth of Anthracotherium and Entelodon that lived in southern France roughly 30 million years ago during the Oligocene epoch.

Bones and seeds tend to leave pits, while grasses and foliage mostly wear scratches, explained Benjamin Burger, a paleontologist at Utah State University in Vernal not involved with this research.