Today, there exist only three elephant species, in Africa and Asia. Yet the diversity of proboscidean species and their distribution was significantly greater in the Earth's past.
Researchers from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, working at the Hammerschmiede site in southern Germany, have now described new fossils of early proboscideanThe animals lived about 11.5 million years ago, at the same time as the first bipedal ape, Danuvius guggenmosi, who was found at the site in 2019. The team assigned the fossil remains of eight proboscidean individuals to two species.
The find is a stroke of luck for science, he explains,"Never before had a juvenile deinothere been discovered with both the permanent tusks and their precursors from the deciduous dentition still in place. This short phase in the life of proboscideans is rarely documented in fossils. The find therefore has great significance for a better understanding of the individual and life history of deinotheres.
"The young animal's milk tusk was found right next to its lower jaw. Computer tomographic images of the jaw also already show the germs of the permanent tusks deep in the bone tissue," notes Hammerschmiede excavation manager Thomas Lechner.otherwise shows no other tooth germs, only deciduous premolars.
The most significant specimen of the four individuals from the Hammerschmiede is a partial skeleton of an adult bull, which was excavated more than 40 years ago by two private collectors, Sigulf Guggenmos and Manfred Schmid.
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