The "Yellow River Elephant" in the primary school textbook has a "saber-toothed" appearance that is totally unworthy of its name!

In the elementary school Chinese textbook, there was a text titled "Yellow River Elephant", which mentioned a Yellow River elephant discovered in 1973, with a skeleton four meters high, eight meters long, and tusks more than three meters long. It was named because it was discovered in the Yellow River area. However, this name has now been abolished because the elephant in the text is actually the Shiyi saber-toothed elephant, which was named as early as 1935.

Stegodon is an extinct elephant. Compared with the famous mammoth, they appeared earlier and had larger tusks, like two giant swords, thick, long and straight, with a slight upward tip, but the saber teeth do not refer to this. In their Latin name Stegodon, Stego corresponds to sword, such as Stegosaurus in dinosaurs; don means tooth, and the original meaning of Stego is actually ridge, so the meaning of Stegodon is "roof-like teeth", referring to their molars.

Stegodon

Mammoth

The molars of saber-toothed elephants are very long, with low crowns and many roof-like ridges on the cross-section. Some later species, such as the oriental saber-toothed elephants, have more than 10 ridges on the third molars covered with chalk, which makes their molars very wear-resistant, but because they are not flat, dry and hard grasses are not within their food range.

We can judge an animal's diet from its teeth, and from its diet we can judge its living environment. The molars of saber-toothed elephants are very suitable for chewing fresh and soft leaves, indicating that their living environment was a warm and humid forest. They lived in the late Miocene about 6 million years ago in the humid Yellow River basin.

As the climate became colder and drier over the next millions of years, the forest area continued to shrink, and the saber-toothed elephant family was forced to migrate south. The saber-toothed elephant disappeared. In southern my country, where large tracts of tropical and subtropical forests are preserved, the most famous member of this family, the oriental saber-toothed elephant, rose up. Together with other famous animals such as the giant panda and the South China tiger, it formed the most representative giant panda-saber-toothed elephant fauna in southern my country's Pleistocene.

Stegodon fossil

During the process of the saber-toothed elephants' migration to the south, they also visited Hainan Island and Taiwan Island, which were connected to the mainland at that time, as well as islands in Japan and western Indonesia. They were trapped there due to the melting of glaciers. Due to the limited resources and space on the islands, the behemoths had to bow their heads under the low eaves and shrunk into dwarfs among elephants with a height of less than 2 meters and a weight of less than 1 ton, such as the Flores saber-toothed elephant in Indonesia. Even more tragic is that they were hunted by the local Flores people, who were about 1 meter tall and could be called the real-life "Hobbit", using small stone tools, and became extinct 12,000 years ago. Not to mention the harm, the insult is extremely strong.

During the Quaternary glacial period about 10,000 years ago, the saber-toothed elephant family became completely extinct. Compared with its relatives that migrated to the island, the Oriental saber-toothed elephant preserved the last glory of the family. At least, it was a "decent person" during its lifetime.