Dinosaur Pig - Wild Prehistoric Monsters | Predators Pigs (Nat Geo)

[Music] thirty million years ago a monster roamed the landscape well we're talking about one of them most ferocious animal to probably ever walk the earth this was the biggest beast to live in North America since the dinosaurs look at the size of that skull look at all those teeth in there there is no animal like this anywhere but this creatures true character has baffled the world's best paleontologists it might look like a pig but it's more vicious than its Risley bear one thing is for sure this beast was so frightening some call it the pig from hell prehistoric America 30 million years ago the dawn of the alig Essene epoch the earth was cooling and as temperatures dropped the landscape began to change in what would some day be Nebraska Wyoming and South Dakota tropical forests gave way to a radically different environment as forests disappeared animals had to adapt to a dangerous new world of wide open spaces with nowhere to hide a world where there was only one way to survive run for your life camels become adapted for open country horses become adapted for open country and you have to be able to escape your predators by being fast runners as prey animals became harder to catch predators also had to change in this arms race it took speed and jaw power to stave off starvation they're winning rabbits cat-like creatures with saber teeth which could kill with one quick bite and the fearsome hyena done with its lethal jaws there was another animal stalking these deadly grasslands scientists call it the intelligent more than a meter at the shoulder weighing in at 270 kilos intelligent was the elec essenes number one menace intelligence I mean they were really bad looking animals that only a mother could love if you were another animal on the landscape and you saw one of these things I think you'd go in the opposite direction paleontologists have always looked at the intelligence share power with reverence but its behavior is one of evolutions most puzzling enigmas was it a pure hunter or did it use its battle tank body simply to protect itself from other predators between the biting and the chewing you wanted to stay away from the business end of this animal just look at it look at the size of that skull look at this all those teeth in there there is no animal like this anywhere until Eden's name means perfect tooth its teeth were driven by a perfect system which gave this creature a ferocious bite it's jaw power came from two massive cheekbones that leveraged the muscles and supercharged them driving the deadliest jaws of its time jaws that could open 90 degrees and could clamp down harder than a hippo's or a crocodile's this beast was bio engineered to bite but what it was eating and why remains a mystery intelidox have no modern relatives no modern close relatives so it makes it a challenge for a paleontologist to figure out how they made their living what would an animal with such an enormous flange on its face such enormous teeth be eating what was it doing intelligent fossils first caught the attention of scientists in the 1850s they decided it was a bear like creature but then grooves in the teeth suggested that intelligence were digging for plant roots meaning that they literally ate like pigs today scientific analysis has confirmed that the intelligence closest living relative is the pig but while this creature has some pig-like features scientists have struggled to place it in any one category in many ways they're analogous to pigs but they're also analogous to bears they're also analogous to hyenas nobody's thought about these animals before and there's no animal alive today that is a direct comparison to until at odds the lifestyle of intelidox has provided paleontologists with difficult questions a new generation of scientists is looking at the intelligent to determine why this plant eating animal had teeth like a carnivore intelligent jaws held four different kinds of teeth canines incisors premolars and molars at the back the back molars were ideal for grinding vegetation but it's hard to imagine that the intelligence would have needed such lethal canines and incisors just to grab plants then in 1993 a discovery suggested that intelligence were chewing on much more than plant roots for over 15 years this quarry site in the Badlands of South Dakota provided paleontologists with a multitude of fossils from the animals that shared intelligence world first time out 30 million years ago this place was a watering hole crowded with rhinos camels and early horses scientists also found one of the largest collections of intelligent bones in the history of North America so many that they dubbed the site the Big Pig dig fossil hunters also found that prehistoric equivalent of fingerprints intelligent teeth marks all over the bones of the biggest and fastest animals of its time these represent bite scars along the dorsal margin of this rhinoceros skull well what could make these marks if we take an intelligent skull we see that the premolars are widely spaced apart so when we lay that over the top here lo and behold they're matching up quite well suggesting that this animal is at least a likely candidate for biting through the top of the skull of this rhinoceros the dick presented key evidence that intelligence didn't just eat plants suggesting that they were less like modern pigs and more like fearsome prehistoric predators we look at the front of the mouth of an Attila diet it's got a very strong bite that's interlocking the teeth come together like that the tips of the teeth don't touch each other so it's not really specialized for cropping vegetation in addition to interlocking the front teeth angled slightly forward giving intelligence the ability to grab and nip something plant eaters don't need that meat-eaters do [Music] the incisors in the canines have been perfectly capable tearing a bite out of a carcass but dentition isn't the only reason paleontologists believe the intelligent was a dedicated carnivore under Wyoming's rugged terrain scientists are finding more and more bones bearing the signature of intelligence powerful jaws across the Great Plains of North America scientists are investigating a prehistoric Pig intelligent has the teeth and jaws of a fierce predator but it's long thin legs and cloven hooves suggest it might not be a very good hunter because it couldn't use them to grab prey who was this beast nicknamed the pig from hell one veteran fossil hunter believes he's found the answer I look at him as an attack predator that he was top-of-the-line predator just like the lion is today in Africa and just like t-rex was in the Late Cretaceous paleontologists Kent son Dell has great respect for this creatures power to kill at Wyoming's White River Formation he's found what he thinks is ultimate proof of its hunting prowess 25 million years ago this was a flat plane near a river where horses camels and rhinos gathered to drink fierce carnivores such as hyena Don's and saber-tooth cats were also drawn here it was the perfect spot to ambush and kill the unwary prey animals in 1998 dr. Sun Dale found the mangled skeletons of seven miniature camels jumbled together all the bones had been gnawed and six were missing their hindquarters in theory they could have been the victims of several predators like the hyena Don or early saber-toothed cats but when dr. sandal matched up the teeth from white Rivers meat-eaters with the bite marks on the camels bones only one fitted bite-marks alone don't proof these camels were killed by an intelligent but where the bite marks are might be a clue on the camels I showed they were bitten in the back of the skull and at the top of the neck he gets next to that prey and he tries to get a puncture of wound through the cranium dr. sundial believes this is the mark of a true predator which kills before it eats and hundreds of miles away in Ohio there's more evidence that intelligence could have hunted evidence from a scientific journey no one's ever taken before inside an intelligence 30 million year old head at Ohio University anatomist Larry Whitmer uses a CT scan to electronically model the brain surfaces of prehistoric animals when he modeled his first and tell adult brain he noticed something unusual this animals eye-sockets face right back out at us what that tells us is that this animal almost certainly had binocular vision meaning the visual fields overlap which allowed them to have some depth perception Larry Whitmer believes in teyla Don's eyes help to identify it as a predator there's a decent chance that this animal has binocular vision as a predatory adaptation to actually spot prey and actually judge their distances which you might actually expect an ambush predator to have so it can actually jump at the right speed and the right distance in order to capture its prey but intelligence bizarre bioengineering doesn't inspire confidence that it could run and jump its body bones are light compared with its massive skull but in fact intelligence easily carried their enormous heads without tipping over using powerful packs of muscle bulging from the top of the spine to the legs and from the back of the head to the tail the animal's head was cantilevered out in front of its body with these ligaments that ran from these spines down to the skull it had full muscle all along either side here and it had muscles coming from the sternum up to the jaw down here massive muscles carried its oversized head but to bring down a camel it would also have to run fast and that's when the intelligence agile lightweight body may have paid off there's just one problem when a Predator catches its prey it relies on its claws to grab it and bring it down armed with only cloven hooves there is no way the intelligent could have captured a fleeing camel or is there it must have been doing something right because there's compelling evidence that plenty of large mammals ended up as an intelligence lunch well it looks like there's a lot of Bones coming out along here and right here we have a really large limb bone and we found evidence that Tila Don's have bitten into all sorts of bones including rhinoceros bones they've been biting into camels we found evidence that they are biting into the long bones of rhinos the bite marks that we see are these - this would be Ken sindell believes white Rivers camel skulls reveal how a cloven hoofed predator captured its prey he runs up next to that other prey and he tries to get a puncture wound through the cranium [Music] until a don't expert Scott Foss disagrees with Kent sindell scenario I doubt Anna - or not used its teeth in order to capture other prey it probably used its larger bulk and ability to accelerate - just run into the animal knock it over once add that animal knocked over then the teeth can go into business then the jaw goes in the business and it could crush whatever it went into and it probably bit the animal right there in the head until a don't had all the tools necessary to kill prey animals but there is more to the job of hunting than just the kill a top-flight predator must have the ability to find and ambush its quarry to understand this part of the process science needs a fossilized window into an intelligence world what would we see if we could follow in an intelligence 30 million year old footsteps at a fossil site in Nebraska that's exactly what scientists have done and these footsteps have led them on the trail of the creatures hunt for food [Music] Northwest Nebraska home to toadstool geologic Park one of America's more remote tourist destinations and a treasure trove for anyone fascinated by life's ancient past okay here's our heel pad toe toe Center hoof which bears most of the weight the middle toe so that makes this a very nice rhinoceros print thirty million years ago these solid rocks were muddy stream banks where migrating animals left their footprints still preserved in toadstools rocks we get it clean it's a very nice rhino way in anywhere around five six seven hundred pounds Dave Nixon has spent over 25 years analyzing the fossilized animal tracks of toadstool Park he pours water on 30 million year old tracks to make them more visible he can then interpret the animal's behavior and he's walking at a deliberate pace but not excited until he gets to this point starts to become stuck in the mud and shows quite a bit of emotion here because really kicks lands here and he's out of the mud but he puts another leap in and the third bound takes him out of our exposure and we're seeing excitement if not fear and if you're a herbivore somebody always wants you for lunch the rocks reveal that something was following the Rhinos we also have some smaller tracks they look really tiny until you realize they're the tips of the toes and what we have is an Intel ADAT the intelligent tracks at Toadstool Park give experts like Dave Nixon an unparalleled opportunity to understand how these creatures might have hunted because on that day 30 million years ago intelligence weren't the only animals following the Rhinos and we have a set of carnivore tracks over here these are smaller and there are some claw marks on the inside but we have another set right here that carnivore may have been a hyena Don 30 million years ago hyena Don was one of the top car [Music] never was in North America it's powerful jaws could pin down any prey animal then it's razor like teeth would finish the kill but it also had the patience to track the prey over long distances the carnivores are following the herd animals who will go through first and fairly close they'd be relatively on the heels of the group mysteriously the tracks also reveal that the intelligence were letting the competition get closer to the prey they're following the main herd but they're not as close in time why would a hungry intelligent on the trail of a meal allow another predator to rush in for the kill the answer may lie in the most puzzling evidence of all what's interesting the rhinos are going that way and the Intel dots they're running at a about a 45 degree angle to the Rhino trail zigzagging seems a strange path to take if the hyena dawn was closing in on the prey but some experts believe intelligence might have had a very good reason to zigzag a reason revealed by a cat scan when anatomist Larry Whitmer modelled the surface of an intelligence brain one exceptionally large nerve cluster got his attention the size of these things right here and what these are are nerves that are actually bringing sensory information in from the snout this was no bloodhound but it still had a very respectable sense of smell and this smelling apparatus here certainly would have been it had been well adapted to pick up the smell of a carcass and that could explain why the toadstool park intelligent zigs act while following the rhinos and hyena Don zigzagging could have helped its nose track the smell of a kill its searching if say something's here or here as you go around it as the wind brought the scent to you you'd be able to basically triangulate in it find it so if you were the winds from this direction and you're upwind you'd miss it but as you came this way you'd be downwind and catch it you could double back it puts its nose up in the wind it catches the scent and then it's gonna start zigzagging along walking from one side of the river bank to the other till it picks up a smell and then it'll start zeroing in on it and by moving from side to side it's able to pick up changes in that smell and zero in which direction that wants to go how do we know this behavior because animals with good smell do that today modern predator behavior could provide crucial clues as to how the intelligent lived there's no doubt that this 30 million year old battle tank was built to kill but it may have let others do the killing and then moved in to take possession what are the strategies we often see that takes place is where what animal will chase another one off of a carcass we see this at Yellowstone National Park where wolves will bring down an elk and a grizzly bear will chase off to the Wolves because it's bigger it's nastier this might have happened to the hyena Don a toadstool Park the hyena Don has run down and killed an exhausted Rhino and is feasting on the carcass until the pig crashes the party the Razr jawed beast goes from fearsome predator to underdog the heinie Don might get in a few blows but the intelidox bulk would overpower its rival [Music] intelligent had the tools to take any carcass it wanted I can't think of any other carnivore that might stand up to it some experts argue that this is the true secret of the creatures success an intelligent could hunt but it didn't need to be a full-time predator instead it left true predators do the hunting and killing and then stole the fruits of their labor stealing fruit from a hyena diet even if it meant getting into a battle with a hyena dot would probably take a lot less energy than having to hunt for food and kill food on its own if scavenging was its lifestyle the intelidox complex bioengineering doesn't look so strange intelligent had the eyes of a hunter the nose of a scavenger the front teeth of a meat-eating carnivore and the back teeth of a plant eating herbivore it may have evolved from a plant eater into an omnivore a creature that could eat whatever was available in a radically changing world and so in reality what this animal ate was anything it wanted that's part of the reason why these animals were as successful as they were for as long as they were on the planet the intelligence success was about to be tested by an ever evolving planet the earth was growing cooler and the landscape was changing some of the intelligence fiercest rivals would not survive but the pig from hell was about to show it could withstand the test of evolution by getting bigger 25 million years ago intelligent reigned supreme it roamed the North American Badlands eating everything fearing nothing taking any food it wanted well we're talking about the biggest meanest animal had ever walked the badlands and was one of the most ferocious animals have probably ever walked the earth nothing could stop the intelligent from dominating their world for millions of years to come nothing that is except planet Earth 25 million years ago the time known as the Maya scene began the earth grew even colder and once again North America began to change the trend towards drying a more arid environment continue and you see woodlands become less frequent become more scattered spotty and find along rivers so you're talking about an open grassland environment very similar to what we think of the great plains today the fossil record reveals that as plant foods grew more scarce mass extinctions began survival depended on traveling long distances to find something to eat one of the selective factors that we see going on is animals becoming larger because it enables them to cover larger distances to find the food resources that they need to survive and that meant that predators were confronted by a life-or-death problem now the animals they hunted were bigger faster and much harder to kill it's like an arms race if the prey become much larger they become too big for carnivores to handle and so the carnivores have to get larger in order to be able to feed on these larger prey items some predators such as hyena Don couldn't meet the challenge after 10 million years as North America's apex hunter it disappeared from the fossil record and that put intelligent survival on the line when the predator is gone the scavenger is now in danger the scavenger now needs to adjust its lifestyle and a scavenger isn't very flexible it's gonna have a difficult time and in fact the so called pick from hell disappeared from the fossil record at about the same time but this species wasn't gone intelligence evolved to rule the North American Plains with a vengeance this pig hadn't become extinct it had super-sized this new version stood over 2 meters tall and was 4 to 5 times the size of its predecessor it still had a battle tank body and a sprinters legs its skull and jaws were now even more massive and more intimidating it was bigger than a modern bison the experts call it Dino Hayase a name meaning terrible hog terrible enough to earn a nickname of its own the Terminator Pig Dino highest this is the monster of monsters this is the beast of beasts the skull alone is almost a meter long this thing could bite through anything the canines are this big around there's just an enormous animal and what is it doing the answer lies at a gate Springs Nebraska one of the few places in North America where Dino Hayase fossils are found 24 million years ago this place was a watering hole an oasis in the arid sea of grass hundreds of animals many of them rhinos gathered here to drink and as the dryer cold a planet killed off their food supply they came here to die making a gate Springs a paradise for predators and a favorite haunt of the Terminator Pig [Music] this thing was eating the big animals we think that this guy was specializing on the large rhinos that lived at the time on the calico theer's that lived here at agate springs this is a limb bone from a calico theory and in it we have a bunch of bite marks made by either a predator or a scavenger the until Adhan premolar one of the teeth you find just behind the canine appears to match these holes very well when it's crushing jaws bit into some of the Maya Singh's biggest mammals Dino Hayase was chewing on more than meat but the important part of this bone is this end here where it's been broken off the animal bit through the bone sheared it off and then had access to the nutritious marrow that was inside bone marrow is one of the most nutritious foods and animal can eat and in times of mass extinction it would have been a prime source of nutrition as the Miocene climate change killed off thousands a diet from scavenged bone marrow may have allowed the Terminator pig to thrive the long bones contain marrow which is good for several years after an animal dies so think of it as canned fat that be available during a drought so the pigs could still find food after a massive die-off even if if they're looking at mostly skeletons the Terminator Pig was the pinnacle of intelligence evolution this beast had super-sized to survive the myosins challenge and it very nearly succeeded but not quite because in this new world survival would ultimately depend on a skill set even the Terminator Pig didn't possess 20 million years ago a new monster predator arrived in North America the bear dog the Miocene epoch 20 million years ago in what's now Northwest Nebraska Dino Hayase aka The Terminator Pig is settling down to eat the chances are good that its meal will be interrupted with its huge size it could handle just about any threat to its dinner except a threat it had never seen before the bear-dog a recent arrival from Asia this savage bone-crushing beast wouldn't back down from any fight the bear dog migrated from its homeland in China and Mongolia across the Bering Strait to North America about 23 million years ago just about the time that North America's top predator the hyena Don suddenly disappeared scientists suspect that it wasn't a coincidence it certainly were probably much better predators and lots of ways compared to hyena Don and so it's a reasonable expectation that they probably drove the last time I ended on to extinction in North America with hyena Don's gone from North America the bear dogs faced off with their only remaining competition but Terminator Pig Dino Hayase relied on its massive size and killing jaws to advantages its ancestors at once deployed against hyena Don but the bear dogs counter-attacked with new evolutionary weapons its first weapon was speed with its heavily muscled top-heavy body Dino Hayase could be a fast runner in short bursts but on the vast open plains the bear dogs bio engineering was perfectly suited for long distance pursuit of prey that was becoming much harder to catch when you look at the scale of this animal it's a much more sophisticated much faster running animal we see longer legs and the horses longer legs and the camels so if it came to running down prey items this animal would have had an advantage its next weapon was its teeth intelligence ate well because their jaws and teeth could tear flesh and crush bone to extract its highly nutritious marrow but bear dogs could do these things just as well in fact even better it's a great animal at biting bone eating bone crushing it and it also has a set of teeth that are sharper than any until Dodson Teela dogs for example where the tips are they're huge canines off and they're not actually very good for puncturing probably because I spent so much time crushing bone with them this animal never does that it's its canine teeth are always much sharper it also has better slashing teeth in its jaw than any auntie LaVon had so in many ways it did a better job what intelidox had done then auntie Lynott's ever did the bear dogs could outrun and out bite the terminator pig and they had a third weapon the Intel Adan Dever possessed the deadliest power ever to evolve on earth air dogs actually had much more advanced brains brains that were much more like what we see with modern animals so where these until aDOT's had relatively archaic simple smooth brands these bare dogs actually had a much more expanded neocortex that was more highly folded these were more sophisticated animals instead of developing brain power intelligence had responded to the Miocene challenge by super sizing into Dino Hayase for almost 20 million years they had ruled their world by brute force but no more from now on brains not brawn would decide who won and who lost nature's battle to survive the mammalian world was fully caught up is this neural arms race that arms race was started to take place and these intelligence apparently we're taking part in that that may have actually put these animals at something of a disadvantage this was an animal that almost certainly was driven mostly by by instinct with fairly predictable stereotyped responses this was not a clever animal in combat Dino Hayase would have been bigger and stronger but brain power could have given bear dogs the decisive advantage today intelligent predators like wolves make up for their smaller size by hunting in packs to execute a creative plan of attack bear dogs might have followed the same strategy against Dino Hayase it's very difficult for Dino highest to compete with the bear dogs with a pack of bear dogs even a large Dino hyo's would have a difficult time chasing them away from a kill these smaller less powerful but more clever animals potentially were able to actually steal kills away from Dino highest the big actually could have used different kinds of techniques fooling Dino highest being able to lead it away or to actually even take on Dino Hayase itself in actual combat and so this is a more advanced animal in terms of its teeth in terms of its speed in terms of its overall body size and especially in terms of its intelligence this thing has a much larger brain for its body size and does any until a dot but this animal hadn t lit on its feet in almost every way you can think of within a few million years after bear dogs arrived in North America they had squeezed Dino Hayase out its favorite food the calico Thea was also extinct without this meal to sustain its own massive bulk the Terminator Pig was forced to compete directly with bear dogs for smaller prey and that meagre food source wasn't enough the super sizing that at once guaranteed success was now a fatal flaw eventually it got to the point where it is no longer advantageous to keep getting bigger because you reach a point of diminishing returns that the amount of food you get by stealing from other animals does not compensate for your needs to maintain a population unable to get the calories it needed the Terminator Pig became the last intelligent so if your prey goes extinct you know you're likely to go to extinct as well just getting large is not a good idea for the future despite its rapid demise intelligent was an evolutionary success it dominated its environment for nearly 20 million years it had the ability and intelligence to either hunt scavenge or forage allowing it to survive on any available food source this behavior is now the norm for more modern omnivores like bears and humans and something a bit of intelligence predatory instinct still lives on when I was kid growing up on a farm as always told don't fall down the Pigpen the later but the intelligence living legacy isn't what fascinates the experts science is unraveling its secrets nothing else quite like it has ever walked the earth all we know is that this strangest of creatures this toothy beast with an Appetite for Destruction dominated it's brutal dangerous world for tens of millions of years a powerful tribute to the intelligent perhaps the most unusual and the most mysterious of all prehistoric predators [Music] you [Music]

Channel: NGeographic Documentaries

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Keywords: national geographic, national geographic documentary, national geographic documentaries, documentary, national geographic wild, documentaries national geographic, animals national geographic wild, national geographic channel, nat geo wild, natgeo, 2018 documentary, Prehistoric Predators, Dinosaur Pig, Prehistoric Monsters, Predators Pigs, Wild Prehistoric Monsters, Prehistoric Wildlife, Strange Creatures, prehistoric documentary, prehistoric animals

Id: ON9CwTvHo2o

Length: 45min 16sec (2716 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 03 2018