Juvenile mandible of the deinothere Deinotherium levius (above) and lower deciduous tusk (below) from Hammerschmiede.
Juvenile mandible of the deinothere Deinotherium levius ( above ) and lower deciduous tusk ( below ) from Hammerschmiede. 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 Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, working at the Hammerschmiede site in southern Germany, have now described new fossils of early proboscidean species. The 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 findings have been published in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution.
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