STARSET_MirrorHuge-Jawed ‘Terminator Pigs’ Unfairly Painted as Predators, Researchers Say
Ancient entelodonts are routinely portrayed as brutal carnivores, but they probably kept to the same menu as todays pigs and peccaries.
古代的食肉动物通常被描述为残忍的食肉动物，但它们可能与今天的猪和野猪保持着相同的菜单。
About 20 to 40 million years ago, entelodonts—immense, snaggletoothed, pig-like beasts—trotted throughout Eurasia and North America. But despite their 3-foot jaws studded with an alarming number of triangular teeth, these barnyard nightmares apparently had a typically porcine diet.
大约在2000万到4000万年前，一种巨大的、牙齿乱乱的、像猪一样的动物，在欧亚大陆和北美小跑。尽管它们三英尺长的下巴上布满了数量惊人的三角形牙齿，但这些谷仓里的噩梦显然是典型的猪食。
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.
最近发表在《古地理学、古气候学、古生态学》杂志上的新发现，揭示了这些奇怪的、已灭绝的哺乳动物及其一些近亲的进食习惯，揭示了它们所居住的不断变化的世界的线索。
Researchers now understand that mammals like whales and hippopotamuses have a close evolutionary kinship. But the fossil record shows that these groups once shared the planet with multiple now-extinct related families, some of which were beyond weird. There were anthracotheres, which were like Dachshund hippos with stretched out, narrow heads. There were also those vaguely piggish entelodonts: buffalo-sized rage swine with wide, winged cheekbones, barreling along on unnervingly athletic legs.
研究人员现在了解到，像鲸鱼和河马这样的哺乳动物在进化上有密切的亲缘关系。但化石记录显示，这些群体曾经与多个现已灭绝的相关家族共享这个星球，其中一些非常奇怪。还有类似腊肠河马的炭疽动物，它们的头又长又窄。还有那些隐约像猪一样的“养猪”:水牛大小的愤怒猪，宽而有翼的颧骨，用令人不安的运动腿快速前进。
“They have a very strange morphology. 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.
“它们的形态非常奇怪。它们就像不同动物的结合，”西班牙加泰罗尼亚人类古生态学和社会进化研究所的进化古生态学家弗洛伦特·詹恩斯说，他引用了内齿兽头骨和牙齿的特征，这些特征与猪和食肉哺乳动物的头骨和牙齿相似。
Entelodonts and anthracotheres aren’t well-understood, said Rivals, particularly in regards to their diet. 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. Other hypotheses suggested the hulking faux-hogs were among the biggest and baddest scavengers of their time, possibly even going full hyena and crushing bones. The idea that these little piggies had roast beef and whatever else they damn well pleased helped make nicknames like “terminator pig” or “hell pig” stick, and was even explored in a nature documentary series.
rival说，人们对Entelodonts和anthracotherts还不太了解，特别是在饮食方面。例如，Entelodonts似乎与杂食性猪有很多共同之处，但它们也被想象成潜在的捕食者，在林地和平原上徘徊，寻找脆弱的猎物，比如某种蹄灰熊。其他假说认为，这种体型庞大的人造猪是当时最大、最坏的食腐动物之一，甚至可能吃得像鬣狗一样，啃碎骨头。这些小猪吃烤牛肉和其他它们喜欢吃的东西，这让“终结者猪”或“地狱猪”等绰号流传开来，甚至在自然纪录片系列中被探讨过。
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. The foods that animals eat leave microscopic pits and scratches on a tooth’s surface. These “microwear” patterns can help researchers tell what foods an animal ate when it was alive. 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.
为了弄清楚杂齿兽和炭疽齿兽到底吃什么，Rivals和他的同事们检查了大约3000万年前渐新世时期生活在法国南部的杂齿兽和杂齿兽的牙齿化石。动物吃的食物会在牙齿表面留下微小的凹坑和划痕。这些“微穿戴”模式可以帮助研究人员了解动物活着时吃什么食物。骨头和种子往往会留下坑，而草和树叶大多会有划痕，本杰明·伯格解释说，他是犹他州立大学的古生物学家，没有参与这项研究。
The team compared the microwear patterns on the fossilized teeth with a database of patterns from other mammals with known diets, such as boars, bears, lions, hippos, and horses.
研究小组将化石牙齿上的微磨损模式与其他已知饮食的哺乳动物(如野猪、熊、狮子、河马和马)的模式数据库进行了比较。
Anthracotherium, for instance, seemed to enjoy a diet of just about everything plant-based, having similarities to browsing, grazing, and fruit-eating mammals.
例如，Anthracotherium似乎喜欢所有以植物为基础的饮食，与浏览、放牧和吃水果的哺乳动物有相似之处。
Read more at Gizmodo.com
在Gizmodo.com阅读更多
