Weird Heads Month #13: Many-Horned Mammals

A colored line drawing of an exting rhino-like mammal. It has a concave forehead, sabre-like fangs, and a total of six blunt horns on its head: two at the back of its skull, two over its eyes, and two smaller ones on its nose.

The dinoceratans were a lineage of hoofed herbivorous mammals whose evolutionary affinities are a little uncertain, but may have been related to the South American meridiungulates. Found in Asia and North America from the late Paleocene to the late Eocene, they had bulky rhino-like bodies and were some of the largest terrestrial animals of their time.

Eobasileus cornutus was one of the biggest of them all, measuring around 2.1m tall at the shoulder (~7′) and living in the Western United States during the early Eocene, about 46-40 million years ago.

And it had a very odd-looking head, with six blunt ossicone-like horns, large sabre-like fangs, bony flanges on its lower jaw, a concave forehead, and a proportionally tiny brain for its body size. The horns and fangs were sexually dimorphic, much smaller in females, suggesting they were mainly used for display or combat between males.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *