I haz ancestors?
As always, our faithful Webosaurs Scholar Irvine has given us a great topic for this week’s Weekly Dino Fact. Inspired by a recent trip to a museum, Irvine wants to know about two ancestors of one of my favorite creatures, the mighty elephant! This week we’re discussing Deiotherium and Platybelodon, two ancestors of the mighty elephant… Let’s take a closer look.
Deiotherium closely resembled the modern day elephant, especially in size, shape and behavior. There were a couple of differences, Deiotherium had a much shorter trunk than the modern elephant and it had tusks that jutted out from it’s lower jaw, but back towards it’s body. This is hard to imagine and Paleontologists are still trying to figure out just exactly how Deinotherium used these tusks, but it they were probably used to either dig up tubers to eat or to scrape bark and limbs from trees, however they were used this was a funny looking beast!
The other ancestor of the elephant that Irvine saw on his trip to the museum is the Platybelodon. Platybelodon was also similar to the modern elephant, but they were much smaller and had a shovel type jaw instead of tusks and ate mostly aquatic and semi-aquatic plants. These were really crazy and different ancestors to the modern elephant that I had never know about until Irvines trip to the museum! Keep them coming Irvine! What do you all think about these crazy elephant relatives? Pretty cool huh? See you on the Island!
-Mio
