- Pizza Park, from Smithsonian Magazine
- Old Goats in Transition, from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)
- Exploring the history of human interaction with plants and animals, from NMNH
Island history
Ossabaw Island hogs were brought to North America by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. A population of hogs was left on Ossabaw, an island off the coast of Georgia, to serve as a food source for future explorers. Because of their role in America's colonial days, these hogs are sometimes used by living-history sites, such as Mount Vernon.
Special feet
Their feet are called hooves, which have two toes on each hoof.
Studied by scientists
On Ossabaw Island, food is much less abundant in the spring, so Ossabaw Island hogs developed a unique way of efficiently metabolizing fat. Biologists who are studying obesity have found these hogs fascinating.
Wild cousins
Hogs are even-toed ungulates, in the order Artiodactyla, which includes deer, hippos, antelopes, and sheep. At the National Zoo, you can see collared peccaries, pygmy and Nile hippopotamuses, scimitar-horned oryx, Greater Malay mouse deer, cows, alpacas, and goats.
