h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My link didn't preview correctly in Pliny, trying again Brunel.

http://www.google.com/search?q=babirusa%20feet,%20images&client=tablet-android-verizon&espv=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&sboxchip=Images&source=univ&sa=X&ei=_iGaVeHmCoqxyQSn8YCIDg&ved=0CDgQiR4&biw=962&bih=601

Hi! Babirusas are actually just pigs, modern pigs, although they're considered different enough for their own subfamily or tribe, and not much is known of their evolutionary history.

I was interested especially in the articulation of their feet.

Modern swine have typically four toes, bearing their weight on the middle two.

Cypretherium, as depicted in your illustration has two toes, a classical cloven hoof.

There's a current debate in kosher circles as to whether babirusa is kosher or not, since babirusa not only has cloven hooves, but also apparently chews the cud.

Admittedly babirusa's tusk display in much more suggestive of that of modern swine than ancient cypretherium.

On the articulation of the feet, it was on a basis of studies of extinct forms that the link between the hippopotamus and the cetaceans was established, placing the cetaceans definitely in the odd toed ungulates, which was a surprise to many people, since prevailing thought until then was that they'd probably been derived from a bear-like carnivore.

Modern swine are not in the moder placental herbivores at all, but instead in the modern placental carnivores.

(Genetic markers, restricting this to modern placental mammals only: modern placental herbivores, eyelashes; modern plcantal carnivores, whiskers, like a cat or dog or pinniped.

Eyelashes and whiskers don't necessarily mean anything with archaic group mammals, shrews, sloths, marsupials and monotremes, which generally lack both, excepting marsupials, which have whiskers.)

At any rate, there's still an open debate on babirusa.

Stipulated, the similarity of babirusa's build to that of ancient cypretherium may be only a coincidence of convergent evolution, same principle as foxes and hyenas resemble dogs, though they're actually more closely allied with cats.