Vanderbilt Paleontology Graduate Student Brynn Wooten Brings Hell Pigs to the Forefront
By Andy Flick, Evolutionary Studies scientific coordinator
Archaeotherium, better known by the irresistibly dramatic nickname “Hell Pigs,” belong to an extinct group of mammals from the Eocene and Oligocene. The animals were neither hellish nor pigs, but their odd mix of features has made them a favorite for researchers. Graduate student Brynn Wooten of the DeSantis DREAM Lab is using them to uncover how ancient mammals fed and interacted with their environments.
Wooten received a nod of support from the National Science Foundation as a senior in college at Fort Hays State University in Kansas when she was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship Program grant. She decided to use that funding to pursue paleontology and dietary reconstruction under Larisa DeSantis, associate professor of Biological Science with a secondary appointment in Earth and Environmental Sciences.
The DeSantis lab – named the DREAM lab (Dietary Reconstructions and Ecological Assessments of Mammals) – studies the pits, scratches, scrapes, and other architectural nuances in the teeth of mammals both living and extinct. By creating cheat sheets of tooth morphologies using data from living creatures, DeSantis, Wooten, and the rest of the lab, can scientifically approximate the diets of extinct animals from their fossilized teeth.
Wooten’s focus is Archaeotherium. In a recent Halloween presentation for the Evolutionary Studies journal club, she shared her ongoing work and emphasized that Archaeotherium had large heads and relatively small brains and were more closely related to whales than to pigs. Evolutionary Studies also provided her with a pilot grant to support this project.
According to DeSantis, “Brynn Wooten, PhD Candidate and NSF GRFP Scholar presented her work at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Birmingham, England. Of the roughly 1,000 presentations, Live Science chose to feature our work!”
The story lays out one of the results from the work:
On the whole, Archaeotherium was typically similar to peccaries (pig-like animals found in the Americas), which shear their food. However, wear on the larger-bodied Archaeotherium was statistically indistinguishable from that of lions and hyenas and indicative of an animal that crushed its food.
The Evolutionary Studies Initiative is excited to see how this project grows and what it reveals about ancient ecosystems!