Moeritherium - Late Eocene (33-37 Ma)Welcome back to the Mammal Zone™, we’re gonna b

Moeritherium - Late Eocene (33-37 Ma)Welcome back to the Mammal Zone™, we’re gonna be talking about a round friend named Moeritherium. It looks kind of like a hippo, kind of like a tapir, but isn’t closely related to either. The Eocene was a very different time from now. The earth, almost done recovering from the Cretaceous extinction, was much warmer. Animals were starting to get big again, and many well-known branches of mammals started diverging, like whales and dogs. There was likely no ice at either pole, and much of the earth was covered in sprawling forests. Moeritherium lazed around in rivers and lakes in Egypt, feeding on soft underwater plants, if its teeth are to be believed. And teeth can tell us a lot. Moeritherium is an early member of the order Proboscidea, which is represented today only by elephants.It most likely had a short trunk, probably used for gripping food, not for snorkeling, sadly. It had two elongated incisors in its upper jaw, which betray its cousinship with elephants. It was only a little over 2 feet tall at the shoulder, too. Isn’t it cute? Even though it’s commonly used as an example of the first elephant, it wasn’t directly ancestral to elephants, probably belonging to a branch of proboscids that died out long ago. Even though they have a definite resemblance, Moeritherium’s short legs and hippo-like lifestyle probably point to a group of animals that evolved in a very different direction. In fact, they lived at roughly the same time as a more likely candidate for elephant ancestry, Phiomia.Moeritherium was featured in the second episode of BBC’s Walking with Beasts, where a group of them mostly just hangs out and eats. I liked Moeritherium as a kid because I thought it looked funny. Of course, I was told that it was the precursor to elephants (until I went to Christian school and was told that nothing was the precursor to anything). No matter how closely related to elephants it is, I just think it’s neat. -- source link

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