#wild hog

The two hog lovers

Spotted in East Texas on Monday morning

Please vote for whichever animal is cuter, not whichever one you like more!

6 million years since humans perished alongside the 50% of the biosphere, earth has recovered though not fully, there is just a handful of megafauna animals that are above a ton descendant of the animals that thrived in the post-human disaster, descendant of invasive and domesticated fauna in some places, others very resilient that were more used to the urbanization of their original terrains and the sudden climatic change for centuries, between these are the descendants of the wild hogs that endured the harsh habitable conditions until the end of humanity, and now with them gone they started to take the empty niches left by all the large herbivores of the Pleistocene and Holocene in Europe. Is not an easy time, the glacial age hasn’t ended yet, and now with the total disappearance of the Mediterranean Sea the once fertile south part of Europe is now more than scattered semi-arid regions.

Hogs have been always strong generalists but the strange conditions of three radically different environments have pushed them to change morphologically depending of the biomes each population managed to adapt, in the far north there are the smaller robust tundra species, the Boarox (Lasiosus sp.) has developed a large coat with a good chunk of fat that help them preserve the heat for the extreme wind storms on the strongest winters, they now resemble a muskox in shape, but unlike those they do not posses robust horns and a very tall head but a wide snout strong lips to tear the vegetation in the snow and large curved tusks protruding of each side help it to plow through the terrain.

Going now to the temperate regions there is something more familiar to the ancestral hogs, but taller, even more gracile and with a shorter coat, Deer Boar (Abstemosus sp.) is something like a suid trying to be a ruminant, has a divergent color pattern that helps them to blend with their environment which derives of the young individual coat, as well their heads are elongate, their ears longer and their snouts narrower than their north relatives, these are more browsers than grazers, a population is increasingly becoming isolated in the once Iberic peninsula.

And finally in the limits of the continent, in the edges of the now permanent dry basin of the Mediterranean there is another species, smaller than the temperate ones, lankier in shape this is the Edge Wandered hog (Scopelosus sp.), a species that resemble the long extinct African savannah species but that inhabit what was once a region covered by a sea. Their ears are larger than their previous relatives, more to accommodate for the heat, their legs are sort of slendy with considerable taller hooves, their coat is very short, with a muted and dull coloration more fitting for this environment, their heads are not as long as their relatives but wider, with short snouts but longer horns, these are more suited to dig for tubers and burrowing insects.

Hugs and Hogs 🐗