All items sold on this website are polyurethane resin replicas, made in USA. No real or natural bone is available on this site.
Merycoidodon culbertsoni Juvenile Skull Replica is 4.5 inches. Merycoidodon culbertsoni Juvenile Skull is museum quality polyurethane cast. Made in USA. 2-part skull (separate cranium & jaw).
Oreodont or Merycoidodon culbertsoni (“ruminating teeth”) is an extinct genus of herbivorous artiodactyl of the family Merycoidodontidae, more popularly known by the name Oreodon (“hillock teeth”).
It was endemic to North America during the Middle Eocene to Middle Miocene (46—16 mya) existing for approximately 30 million years.
Merycoidodon culbertsoni fossils have been found from Alberta, Canada, to Florida, USA. Oreodonts were herbivorous creatures with long tails and cloven hooves.
Their fossils are easily identified by their teeth, which feature both molars and large incisors. It is from this attribute that they earned their name, which means “mountain tooth.”
Merycoidodon culbertsoni are often compared to sheep in size and shape, Oreodonts are usually considered members of the suborder Typlopoda (the group that contains camels); however, some studies place them outside that group.
Oreodonts were unlike any living mammal group in the structure of their skeleton and dentition. They diversified during the period when Earth’s climate was cooling from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55.8 million years ago and reached their maximum diversity during the relatively cool Oligocene Epoch (34 million to 23 million years ago).
The earliest Oreodonts or Merycoidodon culbertsoni belonged to the family Agriochoeridae. The diversity of these browsing, forest-dwelling mammals peaked in the late Eocene (between about 40 million and 34 million years ago).
The skeletons of Oreodonts were unusual compared with living artiodactyls in that they were not unguligrade (that is, walking habitually on their toes). Rather, oreodont skeletons supported a digitigrade stance (that is, their limbs were more like those of dogs and cats).
The middle ears of some Oligocene oreodonts were also unusual in having extremely large chambers that appear to have been specialized for hearing low-frequency sounds.
Oreodont or Merycoidodon culbertsoni fossils are especially common in the Brule Formation of the White River Badlands of South Dakota, U.S.
This formation is composed of river deposits and paleosols (soils buried under sedimentary rock) that developed in savanna-like environments about 34 million years ago.
