Saturday, September 25, 2010

Wyoming Hell Pig rampages through book festival


The "Hell Pig" (a.k.a. Archaeotherium) display at the Tate Geological Museum at Casper College. I was attending "A Conversation about Dinosaurs" at the Tate as part of the Equality State Book Festival. Dino illustrator Ray Troll was one of the speakers. His colorful "Hell Pig" illustration adorns Tate T-shirts.

More on Hell Pig from an October 2009 Casper College press release:

Kent Sundell, Casper College geology instructor, appeared on a new National Geographic TV series: "Prehistoric Predators." The segment in which Sundell appeared was entitled: "Killer Pigs."

"At four feet wide and 1,000 pounds, the killer pig was a prehistoric battle tank that dominated the North American landscape. Endowed with some truly unique bioengineering traits, the killer pig relied on its massive three-foot-long skull and binocular vision to catch its prey," said the National Geographic Society on its website: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/prehistoric-predators/3885/Overview.

The National Geographic crew filmed Sundell in the field at Douglas, Wyo. and at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center for three days in June of 2008. Sundell has proven that the local prehistoric pig specimens from Wyoming, scientific name Archaeotherium, are “definitely predatory in nature.”

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