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First appearing in Africa during the Oligocene, they dispersed into Eurasia and North America during the Miocene and arrived in South America during the Pleistocene as part of the Great American Interchange. Gomphotheres are a paraphyletic group ancestral to Elephantidae, which contains modern elephants, as well as Stegodontidae.
This is a list of gomphothere fossils found in South America. Gomphotheres were elephant-like mammals that lived from the Middle Miocene (approximately 12 million years ago) to the Holocene (6000 years BP). The following species have been described in twentieth and twenty-first century paleontological literature about South America. [2]
From South Asia, the use of elephants in warfare spread west to Persia [164] and east to Southeast Asia. [165] The Persians used them during the Achaemenid Empire (between the 6th and 4th centuries BC) [164] while Southeast Asian states first used war elephants possibly as early as the 5th century BC and continued to the 20th century. [165]
First described by J. Illiger in 1811, it encompasses the elephants and their close relatives. [1] Three living species of elephant are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Extinct members of Proboscidea include the deinotheres, mastodons, gomphotheres and stegodonts.
Notiomastodon is an extinct genus of gomphothere proboscidean (related to modern elephants), endemic to South America from the Pleistocene to the early Holocene. Notiomastodon specimens reached a size similar to that of the modern Asian elephant, with a body mass of 3-4 tonnes.
South America's considerable cervid diversity belies their relatively recent arrival. The presence of camelids in South America but not North America today is ironic, given that they have a 45-million-year-long history in the latter continent (where they originated), and only a 3-million-year history in the former. Family: Tayassuidae (peccaries)
Elephantidae is a family of large, herbivorous proboscidean mammals which includes the living elephants (belonging to the genera Elephas and Loxodonta), as well as a number of extinct genera like Mammuthus (mammoths) and Palaeoloxodon.
Between 1976 and 1980, about 830 t (820 long tons; 910 short tons) raw ivory was exported from Africa to Hong Kong and Japan, equivalent to tusks of about 222,000 African elephants. [60] The first continental elephant census was carried out in 1976. At the time, 1.34 million elephants were estimated to range over 7,300,000 km 2 (2,800,000 sq mi ...