Not-Elephants! They're like elephants but WEIRD! Let's take a look at a lot of extinct proboscidea this week. Oh, and the Casual Birder Podcast episode where I talk about indigo buntings should be released this week, not last week. Oops. Gomphotheres, looking deceptively normal at first glance: THEIR FACES AAAHHHH art by Pedro Toledo: Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon, art also by Pedro Toledo. Note the spiral on Cuvieronius's tusks: Stegodon: Deinotherium, just going totally weird with the tusks and chin: It might have looked a little something like this when alive. What the actual heck: Anancidae tusks were just out of control: Guess what! These two proboscidae are still alive! Hooray for Asian elephants (left) and African elephants (right)! Okay, what the heck is going on in these genealogy sites, pretty sure elephants don't use them: And finally, I swiped this picture of the Mystery Tusk from Karl Shuker's blog, specifically this post. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We haven’t had an episode about Pleistocene megafauna in a while, so this week we’re covering some interesting mammals that are related to elephants and mammoths, but aren’t elephants or mammoths. Oh, and I jumped the gun last week with our mystery birds episode. The Casual Birder podcast is running the finch episode this week, where I have a little spot talking about the indigo bunting. I’ll make sure to put a link in the show notes so you won’t miss it if you don’t already listen to the Casual Birder podcast. We’ll start off this week with an elephant that…isn’t an elephant. Just wait till you hear about the gomphothere, oh man. I’ve been saving this one for a while. Gomphothere is the name for a family of animals that lived throughout much of the world, except for Antarctica and Australia. Researchers aren’t sure yet whether it eventually gave rise to elephants and mammoths or whether gomphotheres and mammoths were just cousins with a shared ancestor. The first gomphotheres evolved in Africa and spread into Asia and Europe around 22 million years ago. From there they moved into North America and eventually even into South America during the Pleistocene, shortly before they all went extinct. So what did gomphotheres look like, and how did they differ from elephants? I’m SO glad you asked. A big part of why gomphotheres would have looked weird to us today is because their bodies were very elephantine. But their faces…were just wrong. For instance, several species of Gomphotherium had a relatively short trunk and four tusks. The upper two tusks were on the upper jaw and jutted forward and downward. Not too unusual. The other pair of tusks were in the lower jaw. They jutted forward side by side and were flattened to form a sort of shovel. For a long time researchers thought it lived in swamps and used its shovel jaw to scoop up water plants, but more recent research suggests it used its lower tusks to cut through tough vegetation. Some species may have used the shovel to gouge bark off trees, for instance. Its head was elongated as a result of the long lower jaw, so while its body looked like a pretty average elephant, size and all, its face would have been long and flattened compared to the elephants we’re used to. I’m picturing the big reveal in an elephant horror movie where the mysterious character in the shadows turns its head and the music goes BWAHHHH and all the elephants in the audience scream. Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon are the only gomphotheres that lived in South America. Despite its name, Notiomastodon was not closely related to actual mastodons. Both Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon evolved in North America just over 5 million years ago, then migrated into South America around 3 million years ago. Cuvieronius preferred cooler environments and lived along the Andes Mountains,