Deinotherium: A Miocene Elephant

Deinotherium is an extinct genus of proboscidean that lived during the Miocene and Pleistocene Epochs of the Cenozoic Era. Although it resembled today's elephants, deinotherium represents a different family of trunked mammals altogether. Although the two are related, African and Asiatic elephants did not evolve directly from deinotherium. Fossil remains have been discovered in Europe, Africa, and Asia which support the contention that the animal was quite successful on the common scrublands of the Miocene. Although most fossil finds have been incomplete, estimates made from measurements on preserved skulls have given scientists an idea of what deinotherium may have looked like and how large it could have been.

Deinotherium was gigantic, the second largest land mammal ever to walk the earth. The largest was the Oligocene indricotherium, a giraffe-like relative of modern-day rhinos weighing nearly eighteen tons. Deinotherium was much larger than a present-day African bull elephant, standing nearly 4.5 meters (14.5 feet) tall at the shoulder. This would have made it an extremely massive beast, invulnerable to all land predators around at the time once it reached a certain size. Curiously, the tusks of the deinotherium curve downward instead of upward as in today's elephants. It is unclear why the tusks were oriented this way. Some scientists have speculated that the deinotherium used them to strip vegetation from trees or dig for roots and tubers in the ground. The trunk of the deinotherium was also shorter than those of modern-day elephants, reducing its ability to grasp objects like branches.

The skull of deinotherium is much flatter than that of modern elephants, suggesting that these titanic beasts were much dimmer in brain power than our well-known pachyderms today. It had two types of teeth. Flattened front incisors were used for chopping and broad molars for grinding up vegetation. Judging by the size of the deinotherium and modern day equivalents, it probably was a treetop browser where soft leaves lay untouched by smaller, shorter herbivores. However, the wide range of the deinotherium as well as its size suggest that it must have needed to eat other kinds of vegetation in order to maintain the energy requirements needed for such a large warm-blooded mammal.

Deinotherium has enjoyed some fame over the past half century, most notably in the interest paid to it by the founder of cryptozoology, Bernard Heuvelmans. Cryptozoology is the search for animals rumored to exist through local folklore and legends, for which current proof of their existence is lacking. The Loch Ness Monster occupied the time of many cryptozoologists throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Heuvelmans alleged that it was a deinotherium still alive in Central Africa that was responsible for hippo deaths described by villagers in the early 1900s. It is highly unlikely that an animal that went extinct more than a million years ago was able to preserve a limited lineage in an isolated portion of the world. Deinotherium also was featured in the 2001 BBC documentary "Walking With Prehistoric Beasts."