The neck is shorter and thicker, and, as the animal
increases in height, we can understand that the long
snout--possibly prehensile at its lower end--is necessary for the
animal to reach the ground. But the snout still lies on the
projecting lower jaw, and is not a trunk. Passing over the many
collateral branches, which diverge in various directions, we next
kind that the chin is shortening (in Tetrabelodon longirostris),
and, through a long series of discovered intermediate forms, we
trace the evolution of the elephant from the mastodon. The long
supporting skin disappears, and the enormous snout becomes a
flexible trunk. Southern Asia seems to have been the province of
this final transformation, and we have remains of some of these
primitive elephants with tusks nine and a half feet long. A later
species, which wandered over Central and Southern Europe before
the close of the Tertiary, stood fifteen feet high at the
shoulder, while the mammoth, which superseded it in the days of
early man, had at times tusks more than ten feet in length.
It is interesting to reflect that this light on the evolution of
one of our most specialised mammals is due to the chance opening
of the soil in an obscure African region.
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