If all we knew about elephants (and mammoths etc) was their skeletal structure, would we have known they had trunks?
Big floppy ears?
I don’t think so, at least, not the full length of it. An elephant skull clearly has a big space and attachment area for the trunk, but I don’t think we’d be able to tell it was longer than a prehensile snout.
Note that Asian elephants don’t have the kind of big floppy ears that African Elephants have. Always look in those old Tarzan movies and the like to makes sure they don’t have smaller-eared Asian elephants roaming around Africa!
We could tell they had trunks of sorts by the position and size of the nasal opening and the marks of attachments for muscles (but as Mangetout says, wouldn’t be able to tell how long it was).
A number of extinct animals have been reconstructed as having at least short trunks on this basis, including Pyrotherium, Astrapotherium, and Macrauchenia.
It has been proposed that because of the placement of the nostrils some sauropod dinosaurs had trunks but today this is generally discounted.
I don’t think the size of the external ear can be determined from fossils.
I remember hearing that some think that in ancient times, people would find elephant skulls and think the nasal cavity was a giant eye socket.
There was a display at the Phoenix Zoo, with an elephant skull, and an informational placard talking about the mythical Cyclops.
In a slightly related matter, apparently you can tell from a Moose’s skull that it has attachments for very agile lips, which the Moose uses to eat river grasses and sedges and things. Some dinosaurs – the big, long-necked four-legged vegetarian bruisers – have similar indications on their skulls…and so may have had agile lips.
The article is no longer on CNN, but Here is my description of the article. The headline did indeed read something like “Cyclops Fossil found in Greece,” but the body of the article just speculated that it was possible that that was the source of the myth.
I’ve also seen a reconstruction of a glyptodon with a prehensile snout, but that does not appear to be widely accepted.
The length of the tusks might give us some idea that the entire snout was at least able to reach past them. Since the elephants trunk is very long and flexible we may not have guessed right about the shape, size, and functionality of the trunk.
How near to the ground an elephant can reach with just its mouth, the distance between has to be covered with something. Unless one assumes they were eating just leaves from the trees, but I’m not sure if their heads are too massive for that. And drinking would mean wading into the water which I think is not always a good idea.
Also they could be considered something like hippos ( and they are good swimmers using the trunk as a snorkel ), maybe they ate seaweed ( teeth would exclude fish ).
There’s a fairly recent BBC documentary about how fossils, etc. were perceived in the past, including this story. Brief details of it here, although I have no idea when it might be shown again, or if it’s available in the US somehow.
There are some frozen baby mammoths, so adult trunk length can be extrapolated from that.
I’m with Freakenstein on this. They’ve got tall bodies, short necks and heads, and low-flexibility legs. They have to be able to reach surface water somehow, and given that we’ve already established that they have a trunk of some length, it’s logical to guess that it’s long enough to reach the ground.
(Aside: We humans also have tall bodies and short necks, but no trunks. That’s because, as observed by the greatest of American scientists, we’re meant to drink wine.)
Good points, everyone.
I think it would be fun for some artist to make “artist’s renditions” of contemporary animals based only on their skeletons, pretending no knowledge of what they actually look like…
Just as an example, one might reconstruct a horse to be really, really shaggy. Just from the skeleton, how would one know they have short hair on their bodies?