Exquisitely Preserved Large White River Oreodont Skull

Description: Believe me; you wouldn’t want to have tangled with this growling, nasty little beast when it roamed the grasslands and plains of ancient America. The skull is solid and heavy in the hand. It most certainly would be a centerpiece for a private collection, or, museum display grade fossil. This specimen shows the complete left side of the skull, as well as, the full front, top and rear. It rests comfortably on a flat lying matrix pedestal that it was prepped from.
The skull has had a minimum of restoration, perhaps 3%. This is well within the acceptable limits for a fossil of this size and complexity. The teeth are all original. There appears to have been a bit of restoration to the back border of the lower jawbone, and a bit to the crest of the skull.

The badlands of the western US are particularly rich in mammal fossils from the late Eocene to Miocene. The Brule Formation is exposed over a huge area including Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado, and yields abundant fossils as layers are eroded. This diverse group of stocky prehistoric mammals grazed amid the grasslands, prairies or savannas of North and Central America throughout much of the Cenozoic era.

The Oreodonta are extinct mammals distantly related to pigs, hogs, camels, hippopotamuses, and the pig-like peccaries. Over 50 species of Oreodonta have been described. They first appeared some 50 million years ago during the warm Eocene and were widely prevalent during the Oligocene in the grasslands, prairies or savannas of what is now the North American badlands. The Oreodonts mysteriously disappeared some four million years ago during the Pliocene. Today, fossil jaws and teeth of the Oreodonta are commonly found in the White River badlands in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Oreodonts have a unique place in the evolution of ruminant teeth and with peccary-like attributes. Oreodonts are Artiodactyls, even toed ungulates, sometimes called a cross between a pig and a sheep. Note that they have both large canine front teeth, but also molars for chewing.