Paleontologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History made an exciting discovery when they uncovered a graveyard of extinct relatives of elephants dating back to 5 million years ago.
The remains were first discovered early last year by Jonathan Bloch, the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum, and his team at the Montbrook Fossil Dig site in Levy County, according to blog posts posted by the museum.
As the paleontologists kept digging, they uncovered what would be one of the most complete gomphothere skeletons found in North America, "a once-in-a-lifetime find," Bloch told the Pensacola News Journal.
The gomphotheres—an extinct group of proboscideans related to modern elephants—likely died about 5 million years ago. It wasn't long before scientists discovered there weren't just remains here, but several full skeletons, the newspaper reported.
This stock photo shows a modern elephant walking through a forest. The skeleton of an extinct ancestor of the elephants was recently uncovered in Florida. This stock photo shows a modern elephant walking through a forest. The skeleton of an extinct ancestor of the elephants was recently uncovered in Florida. Anna_Om/Getty"I started coming upon one after another of toe and ankle bones," retired chemistry teacher and Montbrook volunteer Dean Warner told the News Journal. "As I continued to dig, what turned out to be the ulna and radius started to be uncovered. We all knew that something special had been found."
Most of the specimens were juveniles, and to "make things complicated" the team was finding them on top of the one large skeleton, the museum's blog post said. The large skeleton is about 8 feet tall.
The discovery of this species is not unusual for the site. However, it is the most complete skeleton found from the time period in Florida.
"Modern elephants travel in herds and can be very protective of their young, but I don't think this was a situation in which they all died at once," Rachel Narducci, the collection manager of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum, told the News Journal. "It seems like members of one or multiple herds got stuck in this one spot at different times."
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Gomphotheres were widespread across North America during the Miocene and Pliocene epochs. They then entered South America during the Pleistocene epoch. The last of the species went extinct during this time, around 2 to 1.6 million years ago.
The species lived in forests, grasslands and marshes. Some of them developed teeth that were specialized for all of these environments. They shared several similarities with modern-day elephants, including a trunk that stemmed from the nose. Some also had tusks.
It is possible that mammoths, which lived about 300,000 to 10,000 years ago, were direct descendants of gomphotheres. It's also thought that they could have diverged from this evolutionary lineage at some point after the mastodon evolved.
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