Post #15028

5 interesting extinct elephants: From a titanium of 14 tons to a puska of 6 kilos With elephants, everything seems to be easy and clear: Big, gray, with trunks and tusks, what else can I add? But the deeper you dive into the wilds of elephant history, the more strange and contradictory creatures you find there. We dug through the pedigree of elephants from top to bottom and found five of the strangest creatures - from elephants without trunks to those whose tusks prevented them from living! Erytherium: The smallest elephant Of course, elephants did not immediately become big. Like other mammals, they evolved long and hard from babies. And the first proboscideans, like Erytherium, were not at all impressive with their size. Eriteria lived on the territory of modern Morocco as much as 60 million years ago and were slightly larger than a cat! And the weight was inferior to the Maine Coon - only 5-6 kilograms! According to some reports, he didn’t even have a trunk. But, oddly enough, the trunk is not the most important thing for proboscideans. Much more important is the similarity in the structure of the teeth and skull bones. And in this he was really similar to modern animals. Unless it hurts a little! Oh, if only he knew what his descendants would turn into! Dinotherium: The Largest Elephant That's right, the African elephant is far from the largest proboscis. They used to be much larger. About a million years ago, dinoteria roamed Africa. Giants 4 meters high and weighing from 8 to 14 tons. For reference: a large and healthy savannah elephant weighs 5-6 tons! Dinotheriums also differed in appearance from modern elephants. Dinotheriums had an unusually long neck, by proboscis standards, a much more muscular trunk and, at the same time, very small ears. But the strangest thing about them is their inverted and downward-pointing tusks, whose length could reach 1.5 meters. Moreover, the scope of application of such strange tusks is still unknown. Stylish beard? Or was the bark scraped from the trees? Not clear. Gomphotherium: The most toothy elephant Unlike the two previous characters, gomphotheres were similar to modern elephants in both size and body proportions. With one exception: they had 4 tusks at once. The top pair is standard, just like modern elephants. Gomphotheres needed them for fighting, protection, stripping bark from trees and moving heavy objects - just like elephants. But the lower one looked strange - the short and wide tusks turned into a kind of hoe, with the help of which the gomphotheres tore out and ate low vegetation. Thus, this elephant has turned into a generalist who can get food almost anywhere. It's just a pity that it didn't help them. Gomphotheres went extinct approximately 15 million years ago, leaving no descendants. However, they are still great - their bones have been found from Africa all the way to North America. Successful variety. Mammoths of Wrangel Island: The Last of the Mammot