You'd know an elephant when you see one, wouldn't you? Today we have African elephants and Asian elephants, and we are all familiar with the extinct mammoths and mastodons. But there were once many more species of the order Proboscidea, from which elephants and other long-nosed species came. The strange-looking elephant shown above is Stegotetrabelodon, which really did have super-long and fairly straight tusks on both the upper and lower jaw. These tusks could be up to nine feet long! Can you imagine what and how they ate with those teeth in the way?
Stegotetrabelodon is just one example of the many Proboscidea, or what we would recognize as elephants today, that roamed the world over the past 60 million years or so. Meet some of the most notable and unusual elephant species, including the earliest short-trunked ancestor, the ones whose tusks curved backwards, and ones who used their bottom jaw as a shovel, at Smithsonian.