proboscidean

proboscidean, (order Proboscidea), any of the group of mammals that includes elephants and their extinct relatives such as mammoths and mastodons. Although only three species of elephant are extant today, more than 160 extinct proboscidean species have been identified from remains found on all continents except Australia and Antarctica. Most of these were called gomphotheres, which belonged to a different family from elephants. Elephants and mammoths both belong to the only surviving proboscidean family, Elephantidae.

Within the elephant family, Asian elephants (genus Elephas) and mammoths (genus Mammathus) are more closely related to one another than African elephants (genus Loxodonta) are to either. Molecular studies have corroborated the morphological studies that have long suggested this. A 2010 study using mitochondrial DNA suggests that African elephants diverged from the Asian elephant-mammoth line between 4.2 million and 9 million years ago and then split into forest and savanna varieties between about 2.5 million and 5.6 million years ago. During that later time period, Asian elephants diverged from mammoths. The mastodons that roamed North America until 10,000 years ago are more distantly related and belong to a separate family, Mammutidae.

Elephants, mastodons, and mammoths all have upper incisor teeth that emerge from the skull as tusks. The first proboscideans, however, had three small sets of incisors in each jaw. Moeritherium, a tapir-sized mammal that lived some 35 million years ago, had upper and lower incisors representing an early stage in proboscidean tusk development. Some proboscideans, called “shovel-tuskers,” developed a pair of long and broad lower incisors used for digging. Many, including the gomphotheres, had upper and lower pairs of tusks, whereas others had tusks only in the lower jaw.

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The earliest proboscideans date to the late Paleocene Epoch (61 to 54.8 million years ago) in northeastern Africa. They stood less than a metre (3.3 feet) at the shoulder and did not possess a trunk. Because the trunk is made of soft tissue that does not fossilize, paleontological evidence for it comes from knowledge of the elephant’s cranium, which contains an opening (external naris) low on the forehead where the trunk begins. Generally in mammals the external naris is situated near the front of the mouth, whereas in elephants the naris is enlarged, deepened, and located higher and farther back. Another important clue for the presence of a trunk is an enlarged opening (infraorbital canal) below the eye socket through which blood and lymph vessels and nerves pass to nourish and innervate the trunk. The combination of an elevated and enlarged external naris and an enlarged infraorbital canal is interpreted as an indication that an extinct species may have possessed a trunk. Skulls with the single narial opening are theorized to have inspired the myth of the Cyclops.

The living mammals most closely related to proboscideans are the manatees and the dugongs—marine mammals of the order Sirenia. Proboscideans and sirenians are together classified as tethytherians, in reference to the ancient sea of Tethys, where both groups are hypothesized to have originated. On land the closest proboscidean relative is the hyrax (order Hyracoidea), a small rodentlike animal of Africa and southwestern Asia. Tethytheria and Hyracoidea are grouped together as Uranotheria.