A Dissertation on the Hell Pig with Scott Foss

If you can keep up with all the names, this is a prehistoric creature that may interest you. The entelodont, otherwise known as dinohyus or daedon, was a strange looking animal that spent almost 20 million years on the planet, finally going extinct about 17 million years ago.There's a catchier name for this beast: hell pig. As paleontologist Scott Foss put it, this was a pig-like animal as big as a bison with huge teeth. "There was no other animal like it," said Foss, who did his dissertation on the hell pig at Northern Illinois University.You can find an excellent entelodont skull at the Field Museum in Chicago, said Foss, who did most of his museum work there while working on his doctorate at NIU.Foss compares the hell pig with a bear in that the animal ate a little bit of everything."A bear is an opportunist. It can take down a deer but it will also eat salmon, berries or insects," he said.Likewise, the hell pig, with four different kinds of teeth in its huge mouth, could munch on flesh or vegetation. Foss believes the entelodont was a top predator/scavenger. Just as hyenas will steal a carcass from the lion, the entelodont had the tools to take any carcass it wanted, he said.The fact that the creature roamed across America for millions of years is proof of its dominance but Foss, the division chief of education, cultural and paleontological resources with the Bureau of Land Management in Santa Fe, N.M.,  thinks the animal has been generally overlooked by the public when it comes to prehistoric predators. "I don't understand why entelodonts aren't on the cover of every fossil book. Look at the face of that thing," he said.