Episode 483: Animals with Nose Horns

Episode 483: Animals with Nose Horns

From Strange Animals Podcast by Katherine Shaw

May 4, 2026 · 9 min

About this episode

This episode explores the unique characteristics and history of horned gophers, an extinct rodent with distinctive nose horns.

The horned gopher: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This time we’re going to learn about some mammals with weird horns. Specifically, weird nose horns. Nose horns are properly called rostral horns, but that’s not as funny. We’ll start with a family of extinct rodents called horned gophers, or more properly, mylagaulids. The horned gopher wasn’t a gopher, but it probably looked similar to ground squirrels like prairie dogs and marmots. It lived in what is now North America around twenty million years ago, and it had a pair of short, broad horns that pointed upwards between the nose and eyes, like a rhino’s horns but side by side and made of bone, not keratin. It was big for a rodent, about a foot long, or 30 cm, and ate plants. So what did the horned gopher use its horns for? Both males and females had the horns and they’re too short and placed too far back for males to use them to fight each other. Horned gophers had poor eyesight so males probably weren’t trying to look and act flashy to attract females anyway. At first researchers thought the horns helped in digging burrows. The horned gopher primarily used what’s called the…

People in this episode

Host: Kate Shaw

Topics covered

  • horned gophers
  • mammals
  • extinct rodents
  • nose horns
  • digging methods

Keywords

  • horned gopher
  • mylagaulids
  • rostral horns
  • extinct mammals
  • digging techniques

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Strange Animals Podcast

Places: North America

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