Daeodon
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Daeodon Temporal range: 29–19 Ma Late Oligocene - Early Miocene |
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| A skull of Daeodon shoshonensis at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Artiodactyla |
| Family: | †Entelodontidae |
| Genus: |
†Daeodon Cope, 1878 |
| Type species | |
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†Daeodon shoshonensis Cope, 1878 |
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Daeodon (from Greek, δαίος, daios "hostile" or "dreadful", and οδον, odon "teeth") is an extinct genus of entelodont artiodactyl that inhabited North America between 29 and 19 million years ago during the late Oligocene and early Miocene epochs. The type species is Daeodon shoshonensis, the last and largest of the entelodonts, known adults of this species possess skulls about 90 cm (3 ft) in length. It had a broad distribution across the United States but it was never abundant.
Although not specified in Cope's original description, the name Daeodon comes from the Greek words daios, meaning "hostile" or "dreadful" and odon, meaning "teeth".
The genus Daeodon was erected by the American anatomist and paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in 1878. He classified it as a perissodactyl and thought that it was closely related to "Menodus". This classification persisted until the description of "Elotherium" calkinsi in 1905, a very similar and much more complete animal from the same rocks, which was promptly assigned as a species of Daeodon by Peterson (1909). This led to Daeodon's reclassification as a member of the family Entelodontidae. The exact relationships between Daeodon and other entelodonts are not well understood, some authors (Lucas et al., 1998) consider the greater morphological similarity of Daeodon to Paraentelodon rather than to earlier North American entelodonts, like Archaeotherium, as evidence for Daeodon being a descendent from a Late Oligocene immigration of large Asian entelodonts to North America. However, the existence of distinct specimens of Archoetherium showing characters reminiscent of those present in both Paraentelodon and Daeodon raises the possibility of both genera actually descending from a North American common ancestor.
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