Darwin wondered at the fossil's strange appearance as it seemed to share features with both rodents and rhinos.
“Toxodon is perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered,” wrote Darwin. He first encountered the creature in Uruguay on November 26th, 1834.
“Having heard of some giant’s bones at a neighbouring farm-house…, I rode there accompanied by my host, and purchased for the value of eighteen pence the head of the Toxodon.”
The beast’s skeleton, once fully assembled, was a baffling mish-mash of traits. It was huge like a rhino, but it had the chiselling incisors of a rodent—its name means “arched tooth”—and the high-placed eyes and nostrils of a manatee or some other aquatic mammal. “How wonderfully are the different orders, at present time so well separated, blended together in different points of the structure of the toxodon!”
Although Toxodon is not related to rodents, in 2015, it was discovered to be distantly related to rhinoceros.
