The Proboscidea
Elephants, mammoths, mastodons

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The African Elephant, Loxodonta africana.

Today there are two living species of Proboscidea: the African elephant Loxodonta africanus and the Asian elephant Elephas maximus. However, in the past, there were many members of the order.

Early relatives

Ancestral proboscidean distribution.

The first true proboscideans evolved and diversified in Africa during the Paleogene (65.5 to 23 mya). Phosphatherium escuilliei is the earliest recognized proboscidean from the late Paleocene (58 mya) of Morocco. This ancestral proboscidean was less than one meter tall at the shoulder. Moeritherium, another early proboscidean, was small—about the size of a large pig—and probably did not have a trunk, although it is thought that it had a mobile upper lip. Fossil remains of two Moeritherium species (M. lyonsi and M. trigodon) have been found in Egypt, Algeria, Libya and Senegal in late Eocene to early Oligocene rocks.

Other ancestral proboscideans include Numidotherium, Barytherium, and Deinotherium. Remains of these early proboscideans were recovered in northern Africa along what was once the southern shore of the Tethys Sea during the Oligocene. Numidotherium stood about 1.5 meters tall and had a trunk about the length of a tapir's. Many remains of this early proboscidean have come from middle Eocene deposits in Algeria. There were two species of Barytherium. One species was large, weighing about 3–4 tons and standing 2.5–3 meters high. The second species was smaller, about the size of Moeritherium. Barytherium lived from the late Eocene to the early Oligocene. Deinotherium had a fully functioning trunk and downward recurving tusks in the lower jaw, a trait present in no other proboscidean. It is thought that they used the tusks for manipulating their short trunk or for mate recognition, but not for digging. They had brachydont cheek teeth ideal for shearing soft foliage. Deinotheres roamed the planet for 20 million years, living in Africa, Europe and Asia beginning in the middle Miocene; they persisted in Eurasia until the Pliocene and in Africa until just over one million years ago.

It is hypothesized that anthracobunids (Anthracobune) belong to the proboscidean order, or at the very least, are closely related to it. They lived in southern Asia during the early Eocene. If they do belong to Proboscidea, their presence in Asia broadens the distribution of early Proboscidea.

	Additional UCMP resources Read about UCMP grad student Kaitlin Maguire's role in the planning of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose's 2011 mammoth exhibit. Follow UCMP's summer 2005 excavation, in text and photos, of a partial mammoth skeleton discovered in San Jose. This is the mammoth that inspired the exhibit at the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. Read about grad student Jake Enk's (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario) visit to UCMP and his study of genetic diversity in mammoths. Learn more about mammoths on the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose's Mammoth Discovery! website. Other resources The Elephant Information Repository has lots of elephant pictures and links to all kinds of elephant information. You can learn more about extinct Proboscidea and the end of the Pleistocene from the The Midwestern United States 16,000 Years Ago exhibit at the Illinois State Museum. The Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History has an article about a 1991 mastodon discovery.

	Sources The following sources were used in researching all the Proboscidea pages: Hagelberg, E., M.G. Thomas, C.E. Cook, Jr., A.V. Sher, G.F. Baryshnikov, and A.M. Lister. 1994. DNA from ancient mammoth bones. Nature 370:333-334. Lister, A., and P. Bahn. 2007. Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age. University of California Press. 192 pp. Mol, D., L.D. Agenbroad, and J.I. Mead. 1993. Mammoths. The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota, Inc. Orlando, L., C. Hänni, and C.J. Douady. 2007. Mammoth and elephant phylogenetic relationships: Mammut americanum, the missing outgroup. Evolutionary Bioinformatics 3:45-51. Ozawa, T., S. Hayashi, and V.M. Mikhelson. 1997. Phylogenetic position of mammoth and Steller's sea cow within Tethytheria demonstrated by mitochondrial DNA sequences. Journal of Molecular Evolution 44:406-413. Prado, J.L., and M.T. Alberdi. 2008. A cladistic analysis among trilophodont gomphotheres (Mammalia, Probosicdea) with special attention to the South American genera. Palaeontology 51(4):903-915. Saegusa, H. 1996. Stegodontidae: Evolutionary relationships. Pp.178-192 in J. Shoshani and P. Tassy (eds.), The Proboscidea: Evolution and Palaeoecology of Elephants and Their Relatives. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Saegusa, H., Y. Thasod, B. Ratanasthien. 2005. Notes on Asian stegodontids. Quaternary International 126-128:31-48. Shoshani, J. 1998. Understanding proboscidean evolution: A formidable task. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 13(12):480-487. Shoshani, J., and P. Tassy (eds.). 1996. The Proboscidea: Evolution and Palaeoecology of Elephants and Their Relatives. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 472 pp. Shoshani, J., E.M. Golenberg, and H. Yang. 1998. Elephantidae phylogeny: Morphological versus molecular results. Acta Theriologica (Suppl. 5) 89-122. Shoshani, J., W.J. Sanders, and P. Tassy. 2001. Elephants and other Proboscideans: A summary of recent findings and new taxonomic suggestions. The World of Elephants — International Congress, Rome 2001. Pp. 676-679. Shoshani, J., D.A. Walz, M. Goodman, J.M. Lowenstein, and W. Prychodko. 1985. Protein and anatomical evidence of the phylogenetic po- sition of Mammuthus primigenius within the Elephantinae. Acta Zool Fennica 170:237–240. Yang, H., E.M. Golenberg, and J. Shoshani. 1996. Phylogenetic resolution within the Elephantidae using fossil DNA sequence from the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) as an outgroup. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93(3):1190-1194.

Original Proboscidea page was by Brian R. Speer, 7/8/1997; Dave Smith made minor design changes and link updates, 7/15/2005; major new content researched and written by Kaitlin Maguire, 11/2010; elephant photo by Gerald and Buff Corsi, © 2002 California Academy of Sciences