Uintatheres, with six horns and sabre teeth
An elephant-sized herbivore carries three pairs of bony knobs on its skull and tusks in its mouth.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 8 million years
- Known to
- ± 2 million years
- Era
- Eocene, Cenozoic
Uintatherium and its relatives are among the first mammals to reach truly large size, with skulls carrying three pairs of blunt horn-like protuberances and long sabre-like upper canines in the males. They belong to no living group, and their brains are notably small even for their time. Their discovery in Wyoming became a battleground of the Bone Wars between Marsh and Cope, who described the same animals under competing names in a race that generated dozens of redundant genera.