The Rise and Fall of The Straight-Tusked Elephants

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Here's a recent video talk by Steven Zheng about Palaeoloxodon.



Some interesting things I got from this:

- Palaeoloxodon evolved in Africa by 1 million years ago, and subsequently dispersed into Eurasia.
- P. recki is ancestral to P. jolensis (which stayed in Africa), P. antiquus (Europe), P. namadicus (India), and P. naumanni (Japan).
- P. recki was a specialist grazer in Africa, but when it arrived in Eurasia, it encountered another specialist grazing elephant (the mammoth), and became more of a browser/mixed feeder (P. antiquus).
- Palaeoloxodon seems to go extinct in Europe 50-35 kya (although, perhaps a later study can find more recent dates), in Africa 35 kya, in Japan early into the Last Glacial Maximum (so <25 kya), in India at the end-Pleistocene, and in China probably at a similar date.
- Repeated glacial-interglacial turnovers likely obliterated the metapopulational structure and distribution of the genus, leaving it more vulnerable to predation by humans.
- A supposed Holocene tooth from Palaeoloxodon (which may be from an Asian elephant) was re-dated to >50.3 kya.

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Palaeoloxodon antiquus seems to have been a more forest-dwelling elephant (Borzenkova, 1990; Taylor, 2013). In fact, it's believed the genus Palaeoloxodon never migrated to the Americas due to the cold, arid steppe environment of NE Asia and Beringia, which it was unsuited for (Vlachos, 2021).

Palaeoloxodon never migrated to America, quite probably because of the cold and arid steppe environment of NE Asia and Beringia, which was hostile to the population of this genus.

In fact, the straight tusks of Palaeoloxodon might have functioned to help it move through the forest without getting its tusks entangled on dense vegetation, similar to the tusks of modern forest elephants (O'Brien, 2021).

The straight, streamlined tusks of today's forest elephants help them move unencumbered through their rainforest home. Perhaps the eponymous tusks of Palaeoloxodon served a similar purpose in the distant past.