Deinotherium disappears
The elephant relative with downward-curving tusks in its lower jaw ends a twenty-million-year run.
- When
- Known to
- ± 200 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
Deinotherium is one of the longest-lived proboscidean lineages, distinguished by tusks growing downward and backward from the lower jaw — their function still unclear, with stripping bark and pulling down branches the usual proposals. Some individuals exceed four metres at the shoulder. The last survivors, in East Africa, overlap with early Homo and disappear around a million years ago as woodland gives way to grassland it was not equipped to eat.