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Elephantidae. Elephantidae is a family of large, herbivorous proboscidean mammals collectively called elephants and mammoths. These are large terrestrial mammals with a snout modified into a trunk and teeth modified into tusks. Most genera and species in the family are extinct. Only two genera, Loxodonta (African elephants) and Elephas (Asian ...
Elephants have been the subject of religious beliefs. The Mbuti people of central Africa believe that the souls of their dead ancestors resided in elephants. [183] Similar ideas existed among other African societies, who believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants.
Mammut is the type genus of the extinct family Mammutidae, which diverged from the ancestors of modern elephants at least 27-25 million years ago, during the Oligocene. M. americanum , known as an "American mastodon" or simply "mastodon," had a long and complex paleontological history spanning all the way back to 1705 when the first fossils ...
Dwarf elephant. Dwarf elephants are prehistoric members of the order Proboscidea which, through the process of allopatric speciation on islands, evolved much smaller body sizes (around 1–2.3 metres (3 ft 3 in – 7 ft 7 in) shoulder height) in comparison with their immediate ancestors. Dwarf elephants are an example of insular dwarfism, the ...
P. wintoni. Palaeomastodon ("ancient mastodon") is an extinct genus within the elephant order Proboscidea. Its fossils have been extracted from Oligocene strata conventionally dated to 33.9-23.03 million years old. Usually considered an ancestor or near-ancestor of elephants or mastodons as a member of Elephantiformes [1] it lived in marshes ...
The Asian elephant ( Elephas maximus ), also known as the Asiatic elephant, is a species of elephant distributed throughout the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, from India in the west to Borneo in the east, and Nepal in the north to Sumatra in the south. Three subspecies are recognised— E. m. maximus, E. m. indicus and E. m. sumatranus.
The history of elephants in Europe dates back to the time of the Roman Empire, but previously, during the Ice Age, relatives of elephants were spread across the globe, including Europe. Mammoths roamed the northern parts of the Earth, from Europe to North America. The straight-tusked elephant of mainland Europe principally inhabited the ...
Asian elephants share a closer common ancestry with mammoths (genus Mammuthus) than they do with African elephants (Loxodonta). [4] The oldest species attributed to the genus Elephas is E. nawataensis from the Late Miocene-Early Pliocene of Kenya, though the validity of this species and its relationship to Elephas has been doubted. [5]