Platybelodon - Platybelodon grangeri

Platybelodon. We're going back to the Miocene to find these relatives of elephants, particularly between 15 and 4 million years ago. As the name obviously suggests to those who know their greek, these guys had built-in shovels. Flat tusks, anyway. Where elephants have only one pair of long upper-jaw incisors jutting out from their upper jaws, Platybelodon had those and a pair of flattened incisors on their lower jaw.



Whether Platybelodon actually used those curious lower tusks to shovel up swampy wet muck or used their edges like a knife to slice off vegetation is up for debate, but they're pretty sharp items of dentition that were certainly capable of slicing through feed for that gigantic body.

While that's an impressive jaw on the image above, it doesn't quite show the sheer weirdness of the short & wide front tusks. For that, take a peek at the lower jaw, viewed from above.



Impressive, no?

Other than the built-in eating utensil, the rest of Platybelodon is similar to modern day elephants. Large solidly built plant munchers with short skulls - oh, and a short trunk.