Ancient elephants. These amazing primitive mammals. Saber-toothed tiger - Smilidon californicus
home Reading the article will take:exactly about them, as you already guessed), then this enclosure is especially popular with visitors, young and old. I decided to understand the genealogy of elephants, calculate their most distant ancestor, and, in general, understand “who is who” among the long-eared and trunk-equipped. And this is what happened to me... It turns out that elephants, mastodons and mammoths, as well as pinnipeds dugongs and manatees, had a common ancestor - moeritherium (lat. Moeritherium). Externally, the moriteriums that inhabited the Earth approximately 55 million years ago were not even close to their modern descendants
- short, no higher than 60 cm at the withers, they lived in shallow reservoirs of Asia of the late Eocene and were something between a pygmy hippopotamus and a pig, with a narrow and elongated muzzle.
Now about the direct ancestor of elephants, mastodons and mammoths. Their common ancestor was the paleomastodon (lat. Palaeomastodontidae), which inhabited Africa about 36 million years ago, in the Eocene. The paleomastodon had a double set of tusks in its mouth, but they were short - it probably ate tubers and roots. No less interesting, in my opinion, a relative of modern long-eared and proboscideans was a funny animal, nicknamed by scientists Platibelodon danovi. This creature inhabited Asia in the Miocene, about 20 million years ago, and had one set of tusks and strange spade-shaped incisors on its lower jaw. Platybelodon actually did not have a trunk, but it upper lip
it was wide and “corrugated” - somewhat similar to the trunk of modern elephants. It's time to deal with more or less widely known representatives of the proboscis family - mastodons, mammoths and elephants. First of all, they are distant relatives, i.e. two elephants - African and Indian - did not descend from mammoths or mastodons. The body of mastodons (lat. Mammutidae) was covered with thick and short hair, they ate mostly grass and foliage of shrubs, and spread to Africa during the Oligocene period - about 35 million years ago.
Contrary to feature films, where the mastodon is usually depicted as an aggressive giant elephant with huge tusks, they were no larger than the modern African elephant: the height at the withers was no more than 3 meters; There were two sets of tusks - a pair of long ones on the upper jaw and short ones, practically not protruding from the mouth, on the lower jaw. Subsequently, mastodons completely got rid of a pair of lower tusks, leaving only the upper ones. Mastodons became completely extinct not so long ago, if you look from an anthropological point of view - only 10,000 years ago, i.e. our distant ancestors were well acquainted with this species of proboscis.
Mammoths (lat. Mammuthus) - those same shaggy, proboscis and with giant tusks, the remains of which are often found in Yakutia - inhabited the Earth on several continents at once, and their lives big family happily for as many as 5 million years, disappearing about 12-10,000 years ago. They were much larger than modern elephants - 5 meters tall at the withers, huge, 5-meter tusks, slightly twisted in a spiral. Mammoths lived everywhere - in South and North America, in Europe and Asia, they easily endured ice ages and protected themselves from predators, but could not cope with the bipedal ancestors of humans, who diligently reduced their population throughout to the globe. Although scientists still consider the main reason for their complete and widespread extinction glacial period caused by the fall of a huge meteorite in South America.
Today, two species of elephants exist and are relatively healthy - African and Indian. African elephants(lat. Loxodonta africana) with a maximum weight of 7.5 tons and a height at the withers of 4 meters, they live south of the African Sahara Desert. Just one representative of this family is in the first image of this article.
Indian elephants (lat. Elephas maximus) with a weight of 5 tons and a height of 3 meters at the withers, are common in India, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, Laos and Sumatra. Indian elephants have much shorter tusks than their African relatives, with females having no tusks at all.
Elephant skull (varnished, sort of)
By the way, it was the skulls of mammoths, regularly discovered by ancient Greek researchers, that formed the basis of the legends about giant Cyclops - most often there were no tusks on these skulls (nimble Africans stole them for construction purposes), and the skull itself was very similar to the remains of a colossal Cyclops. Note the hole in the frontal part of the skull, to which the trunk is connected in living elephants.
Modern species of elephants are only the remnants of the great family of proboscis, which in the distant past inhabited planet Earth...
In 1959, British chemist John Kendrew discovered the structure of the muscle protein myoglobin and three years later received a Nobel Prize. Half a century has passed, but this protein continues to be the subject of active study and sometimes reveals unexpected secrets. In a recent issue of the journal Science, biologists from the UK, USA and Canada talked about the features of myoglobin in cetaceans and how much time the ancestors of some modern mammals spent under water.
Myoglobin is an oxygen-binding protein that can be found in the muscles of all mammals, it gives the red color to muscles due to the iron it contains. Aquatic animals generally have more myoglobin than terrestrial animals. The sperm whale, for example, has one of the highest concentrations of this protein in its muscles; a lot of oxygen is stored there, and therefore it can not surface for an hour and a half.
As a new study shows, not only thanks to a huge number myoglobin, aquatic mammals can stay under water for a long time. The fact is that the surfaces of these proteins carry an excess positive charge in these animals, due to which the molecules repel each other. This ensures that myoglobin does not stick together in such huge concentrations - otherwise it would turn into non-functional protein masses.
Similar well-charged myoglobins are present in the muscles of many aquatic animals - seals, walruses, beavers, muskrats. In those that spend less time in water, such as marsh shrews and star-nosed moles, myoglobins carry less charge than in aquatic mammals, but still more than in completely terrestrial mammals. High altitude and subterranean species are also supposed to need oxygen, but their myoglobins are not as highly charged as those of divers. Thus, positively charged myoglobin may serve as an indicator of aquatic life.
In addition, scientists were able to reconstruct the myoglobin molecules that were present in the ancestors of modern cetaceans. Knowing the structure of ancient myoglobins and their amino acid composition, one can estimate whether they were highly charged and how much time their owners could spend under water. It turned out that, for example, the pakicetus, the land-based ancestor of our whales that lived in Pakistan in the early Eocene, could afford to dive for no more than one and a half minutes. And the huge Late Eocene Basilosaurus dived for a maximum of 17 minutes. Fossil remains may hint that the animal led an aquatic lifestyle, but new approach allows you to confirm this and even evaluate your diving abilities!
But biologists did not stop there - they restored myoglobins for the ancestors of some terrestrial animals. The result was surprising: modern elephants, hyraxes, moles and echidnas come from animals whose myoglobins were so charged! Interestingly, a recent paper suggested, based on fossil bones, that the ancestors of echidnas were swimmers. Other paleontologists have hypothesized about the aquatic ancestors of elephants and moles. Thus, myoglobin simply repeats the story that the bones began to tell.
We can't imagine what it looked like common ancestor elephants, hyraxes, manatees and walruses - we don’t have his bones. But there is a tiny molecule thanks to which we can confidently say that his muscles were adapted for diving.
Prepared from materials
Trogontherian elephant - ancestor of the mammoth
The trogontherian elephant (Mammuthus trogontherii), also called the steppe mammoth, lived 1.5 - 0.2 million years ago, and the latest trogontherian elephants lived side by side with mammoths. The trogontherian elephant, mammoth, and modern elephants belong to the same family of elephantidae. The mammoth and the trogontherian elephant are very close relatives, since mammoths descended from the trogontherian elephants. Moreover, trogontherian elephants apparently were the ancestors of American mammoths.
Trogontherian elephants lived 1.5 million years ago in Northern Asia, where it was not as cold as it is now, and then from this area they spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere, even reaching Central China and Spain.
Mammoths lived in Eurasia and North America - after all, in those days there was an isthmus on the site of the Bering Strait, and it existed for a very long time. From time to time (for 30-40 thousand years) it was covered by the glacier of the American Arctic shield and, except for birds, no one could get to America and back. When the glacier melted, the path opened for other living beings. At the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene era (more than 500 thousand years ago), the ancestors of mammoths - trogontherian elephants, apparently penetrated into North America, settled there and American mammoths descended from them. This is a separate branch of mammothoid elephants. Their scientific name is the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi). Later, in the late Pleistocene era (70 thousand years ago), the mammoth itself entered North America from Siberia ( woolly mammoth–Mammuthus primigenius), and both types of mammoths lived side by side in America.
The remains of mammoths make it possible to determine what the mammoth lived, what it ate, and what it suffered from. Mammalian bones are a “matrix” on which traces of growth, disease, individual age, injury, etc. remain. For example, only from the bones of baby mammoths from the Sevsk location (Bryansk region) it was established that mammoth calves at birth were 35-40% smaller than the calves of modern elephants, but in the first 6-8 months of life they grew so quickly that they caught up with children of their modern relatives. Then growth slowed down again. This suggests that in winter, which just began at the 6-7th month of a newborn mammoth’s life, he ate worse; his mother could no longer feed him milk. Therefore, the baby mammoth began to eat the same food as adults. The wear of baby mammoth teeth confirms this. The teeth of the first shifts of mammoths began to wear out and wear out much earlier than those of the cubs of modern elephants.
A group of mammoths from Sevsk most likely died as a result of a very strong flood, which cut off their exit from the river valley, and this happened at the very beginning of spring. River sediments that contained bones show how the strength of the current gradually weakened and eventually the place where the mammoth corpses remained turned first into an oxbow lake and then into a swamp.
Living beings are born, grow up and die. If nothing happened to nature around, many generations replace each other, year after year, century after century.
But if something changes, it becomes colder or, on the contrary, hotter, living beings either adapt to these changes or die out. Extinctions of living beings due to disasters are extremely rare events. The existence of one or another group of extinct living beings ended for various reasons... The reasons for the extinction of mammoths are related to climate change. Mammoth and man lived on the Russian Plain side by side for more than 30 thousand years and no extermination occurred. Only after climate change began at the end of the Pleistocene period did the mammoth become extinct. Nowadays, the hypothesis that huge piles of mammoth bones from Paleolithic sites are not the result of hunting, but traces of the collection of mammoth bones from natural locations, is becoming increasingly widespread. These bones were needed as raw materials for making tools and much more. Of course, people hunted mammoths, but there were no tribes that would specialize in hunting them. The biology of the mammoth is such that it could not be the basis of human life; the main commercial species were horses, bison, reindeer
and other animals of the Ice Age. Our ancestors, of course, hunted, since human ancestors abandoned eating grass more than 3 million years ago - this is not a productive path of evolution. But Australopithecines followed this path in African savannas
they grazed in the grasslands along with the ancient baboons - geladas and antelopes, but became extinct when the climate in Africa became more arid. In order for a person to eat someone, he must first be caught. Ancient man had only one device for this - his brain. Using this “tool,” man gradually improved his tools and hunting techniques. Without tools and weapons, a person has no chance of catching another animal. The history of the human race is very long and shows that it was not always possible to successfully find food for ourselves. Yes, we have to admit that ancient people also ate animal corpses, according to at least, at the earliest stages
Perhaps no animal in the world has been as offended as the elephant. These giant herbivores are the largest inhabitants of land, but? Almost nothing. Let's start with the fact that many mistakenly attribute the mammoth ancestor to elephants. But this is fundamentally wrong. Mammoths, mastodons and elephants are completely different families. And who is part of the elephant family? Let's figure it out.
1 Erytherium (60 million years ago)
The ancient ancestors of elephants were by no means such giants. And their trunk was only in outline. The very first pro-elephant that scientists discovered was erytherium. A completely small animal weighed up to 5 kilograms. It was possible to identify him only from individual fragments of the jaw, but this was enough, because it is the teeth that serve distinctive feature proboscis
2 Phosphateria (57 million years ago)
Phosphateria is the next in line of the great-great-great of our gray giants. And it is already noticeably larger: from those fragments that have been preserved from the distant times of its existence, one can determine its height (no more than 30 cm) and weight (up to 17 kg). Scientists came to the conclusion that the animal was an omnivore.
3 Meriteria (35 million years ago)
A semi-aquatic animal that lived along the edges of reservoirs, Meriteria, which already has the beginnings of a trunk and long divided incisors, from which elephant tusks are later formed. And yes, they were larger - they weighed up to 250 kg, and reached 1.5 meters at the withers.
4 Bariteria (28 million years ago)
Up to three meters high, with a large skull and fairly developed fangs protruding from under the nose-trunk - if you met a barytherium, it would definitely scare you. Just look at the cost of the fangs, from which in the future tusks will develop, protruding from both the lower and upper jaws - obviously not only for obtaining food!
Around the same time, paleomastodons lived and died out. They were distinguished by obvious elephantine features: the structure of the body, skull, and the presence of tusks, which were no longer involved in chewing. On the lower jaw they were spade-shaped; scientists suspect that animals used them to obtain food in the upper layer of the earth.
6 Deinotherium (17 million years ago)
Strictly speaking, scientists are not sure whether Deinotherium was the ancestor of the elephant. It may well be that this is just a separate branch of evolution that has not survived to this day (but early people it was seen, because Deinotherium disappeared 2 million years ago). Well, they were terrible animals: with tusks curved down, a huge trunk, a massive (up to 1.2 m) skull, up to 4.5 meters high!
7 Platybelodon (15 million years ago)
Another representative of the proboscis on the way to modernity acquired formidable tusks protruding forward and a powerful lower jaw with spade teeth. Platybelodons lived, as they now say, everywhere: in America, Eurasia and Africa.
8 Gomphotherium (3.6 million years ago)
Add sharp tusks on the lower jaw to the modern Indian cutie elephant, straighten those on the upper jaw, and you get a gomphotherium. And he won't look so friendly anymore. The tusks of gomphotheriums differed from modern elephants in that they had real tooth enamel!
9 Stegodons (2.6 million years ago)
Height 4 meters, length 8 meters + 3 meters of tusks make these extinct proboscideans one of the most largest ancestors elephants. The last specimens survived on the island of Flores until 12 thousand years ago in dwarf form, where the Hobbits (Florentine Man) were discovered. The species is so close to modern ones that the elephants of Bardia Park still show features of Stegodons.
10 Primelphas (2.6 million years ago)
And now, finally, we come to the closest relative of elephants - in fact, this is its ancestor, primelfas, or “the first elephant.” It was he who gave rise to the branches of elephants, mammoths and mastodons. Meanwhile, it didn’t look much like a modern elephant, since it had four tusks, but what can you do, it’s still related.
It's no secret that in ancient world unique animals lived, which, unfortunately or fortunately, we were not destined to see. But the massive and huge remains testify to the greatness and strength of these mammals. Thus, in the past, animals adapted to environment, and even individuals of the same species could change under its influence. Many are interested in such a unique mammal as the mastodon. This is an animal from the proboscis order, which in many ways resembled mammoths, but also had differences from them.
Characteristics of mastodons
Nowadays, no one thinks that perhaps the mastodon is the most striking ancestor of the ordinary elephant. home common feature animals, of course - the trunk, as well as their enormous size compared to other inhabitants of the wild. At the same time, it was found that mastodons were no larger than elephants, which we can see today in zoos or on TV.
Mastodons are considered extinct mammals. They had similar features to other representatives of the proboscis order, but there were also differences. The main one is that these large mammals had paired nipple-shaped tubercles on the chewing surface of their molars. And mammoths and elephants had transverse ridges on their molars, which were separated by cement.
Origin of the name "mastodon"
It is interesting that mastodon is translated from Greek as “nipple”, “tooth”. Consequently, the name of the animal comes from the structure of its teeth. Note that some individuals had tusks in the lower jaw area, which (according to scientists) were transformed from second incisors.
Mastodons were considered herbivores, unable to harm any neighbor in big house entitled " wild nature" The main dish of the proboscis order was also shrubs. However, if the mammals were frightened, they could simply kill a nearby animal with their enormous weight as a result of a sudden movement, without meaning to.
Male mastodons
Some scientists are convinced that mastodons were no taller than an ordinary elephant. Males of the proboscis order could reach three meters at the withers. It is worth noting that they preferred to live separately from the herd, that is, females and their cubs. Their sexual maturity occurred at the age of ten to fifteen. On average, mastodons lived sixty years.
It is also worth noting that there were different types mammals (the American one was described above), and almost all of them were similar. But in fact, mastodons appeared in Africa. This was 35 million years ago. A little later they moved to Europe, Asia, North and South America.
Mastodon implies an influential figure, something big, for example, a mastodon of business, a mastodon of literature) unlike an elephant, had tusks in the upper and lower jaw. A little later, the appearance of the proboscis order changed, and the number of fangs decreased to one pair. Scientists have found that about 10 thousand years ago. There were about twenty species of them.
One of the versions of the extinction of mastodons was the infection of mammals with tuberculosis. But after their disappearance they did not remain forgotten. Scientists are constantly studying the bones and tusks of mastodons, making new discoveries and delving into the history of unique mammals. In 2007, the animal's DNA was examined using its teeth. The study proved that the remains of the mastodon were from 50 to 130 thousand years old.
Thus, the mastodon is unique and not fully studied large mammal, which walked the earth tens of thousands of years ago and was considered one of the most benevolent animals. It has been proven that over time they began to eat grass, preferring it to tree leaves and shrubs, although their massive tusks made them excellent at hunting.