Palaeotherium
| Palaeotherium | ||||||||||||
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Fossil skull from Palaeotherium |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Eocene to Oligocene | ||||||||||||
| 48.6 to 28.4 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Palaeotherium | ||||||||||||
| Cuvier , 1804 | ||||||||||||
Palaeotherium is an extinct genus of mammals classified in the horse- related family of Palaeotheriidae . It lived from the Upper Eocene to the Lower Oligocene mainly in what is now Europe .
Outwardly, Palaeotherium may have resembled a tapir . The rather short legs had four toes in front and three toes in the back, the molars were low-crowned and more geared towards leaf food. From the structure of the nasal bones one concludes that these animals had a short trunk. Palaeotherium was larger than its predecessor and reached shoulder heights of 0.75 to 1.4 meters depending on the species.
Presumably they lived together in flocks in swampy forests, where they plucked leaves from the trees with their trunks and ate them.
Fossil remains of Palaeotherium (the name means "old animal") were first discovered in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century and first described by the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier . The genus is systematically considered to be one of the last and at the same time the largest of the Palaeotheriidae family . From today's perspective, this group does not represent the immediate ancestors of the horses, but rather formed a side branch that died out again relatively early.
literature
- Thomas S. Kemp: The Origin & Evolution of Mammals. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005. ISBN 0198507615 .