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 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 a king, and that God had transformed him into a swine for his sins.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our Halloween season series called Hogs of Hell.
Now.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 the terminator pigs. That's got to be a subsequent nickname there.
Right, Yeah, yeah, I don't know how clinical that is.
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,
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 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 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
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
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.
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.
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. 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.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, a lot of nooks and crannies.
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 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 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 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 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
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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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
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.
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 positive change into my life.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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 idea was taking the skeletons of animals we know today and cutting out all of the excess soft tissue and just shrink wrapping them.
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.
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 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.
On a lot of hoofed.
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 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 meme troll face.
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.
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.
Well that makes me feel worse.
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 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 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 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
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 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 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.
All right, the Doom creature in that like that pink guy, the big pink one with oh it's.
Gotta be yeah, yeah, yeah, they had the visible forms as well.
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.
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 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.
Yeah have a very dangerous animal in the wild.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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 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 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, 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
Oh yeah, what, I know that's come up in the show before about humans as intimidation scavengers.
Yeah, yeah, some traditional human practices along those lines.
Yeah, so antilo dants maybe not literally pigs, more pigs in name only, but good enough as monster pigs for me.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that is extremely terrifying.
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.
I don't know, it's freaky.
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?
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Or at least injured by them. But yeah, I thought it.
Would be like straight up eating down to the bone. Yeah, it's kind of horrifying sequence.
I agree. You know that was scary as heck. I remember that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, in the book there's something even weirder. I think he gets thrown into some eels or.
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 jump in other Halloween related cinematic pigs, hogs, bores, and so forth.
Yeah, send them our way contacted stuff to blow your mind dot com.
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, 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
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.
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.
I don't know how you didn't start our series talking about that.
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 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 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.
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.
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