Southern elephant

Southern elephant
	Skeleton of a Mammuthus meridionalis , Muséum national d'histoire naturelle , Paris .
Temporal occurrence
	early Pleistocene
	2.6 to 0.7 million years
Locations
	Pitrafitta in central Italy; Nogaisk in southern Russia; Durfort in France; Untermaßfeld in Germany; North America;
Systematics
	Elephantimorpha
	Elephantida
	Elephants (Elephantidae)
	Elephantinae
	Mammoths ( Mammuthus )
	Southern elephant
Scientific name
	Mammuthus meridionalis
	( Nesti , 1825)

Reconstruction drawing of the southern elephant from 1916

Mammuthus meridionalis molar tooth

The Mammuthus meridionalis ( Mammuthus meridionalis ), also Urmammut or Südmammut called, is an extinct of elephant and today genus Mammuthus attributed. Its first describer Filippo Nesti suspected an even closer relationship to today's elephants of the genus Elephas and gave it the name Elephas meridionalis . In the meantime it was also called Archidiskodon meridionalis .

The species had relatively broad molars with relatively few transverse lamellae. The mighty tusks were almost 4 m long and already showed the screw shape characteristic of mammoths. Large specimens of the southern elephant were over 4 m high. It is not known whether it already had fur like later mammoth species.

It was one of the early mammoth species and the first to leave the genus' African area of origin and reach Eurasia. About 1.5 million years ago it immigrated to North America over the Bering Land Bridge, which had fallen dry at the time . The later mammoth species such as the steppe mammoth and the prairie mammoth emerged from the southern elephant . The two African species Mammuthus africanavus and Mammuthus subplanifrons come into consideration as ancestors . The southern elephant lived in the open forest areas of Eurasia and North America, where a relatively mild climate prevailed 2 million years ago.

A complete skeleton of the southern elephant is in the State Museum of Stavropol . The only complete skeleton found in North America is on display in Denver . A third specimen, the over 4 m high "Elephant of Durfort" (the skeleton of a southern elephant), can be seen in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris .

literature

Douglas Palmer: Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Animals. An illustrated encyclopedia. Könemann, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-8290-6113-7 .
Adrian Lister, Paul Bahn: Mammoths. The giants of the ice age. Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Sigmaringen 1997 ISBN 3-7995-9050-1 .
Spectrum of Science (Human Mammoth Ice Age). 1/2006.