Many faces of Moeritherium

You might have noticed that Oxford is the home of elephant-related research: First we had elephants & bees, then elephant sex and now amphibious elephants.

Okay, we know that elephants can swim but Moeritherium, an ancient relative of modern elephants, spent most of its time in water and ate freshwater plants - giving it quite a different diet and mode of life to today's trumpeters.

What struck me was how knowing something as seemingly basic as what an extinct animal ate, and how much it was around water, fundamentally changes how we reimagine it from its (in this case rather patchy) skeletal remains. In 1908 Charles William Andrews imagined it as the grazing, elephantine land mammal above. Yet with no complete skeleton a lot of guess work was inevitable. Despite the graceful pen and ink strokes is it just me or does our early elephant look a little uncomfortable bending down to browse?

In the 1920s that great artist of prehistoric beasts Heinrich Harder (1858-1935) gave us an altogether more sophisticated interpretation of Moeritherium in the painting above. This lithe specimen is tapir or boar-like, an all-terrain proboscidean designed for dodging in and out of forest clearings, rooting around for food in the underbrush. It may like the water, as its modern relatives do, but with a svelte body shape it hardly needs it for support, comfort, concealment.

And so bang up-to-date with our final portrait: Moeritherium as imagined by Luci Betti-Nash of Stony Brook University.

New isotopic evidence from Moeritherium teeth exhumed from rocks in Egypt's Fagun Desert, taken with results from other studies, now tips the scales towards the extinct mammal being semi-aquatic. Instead of land mammals taking a refreshing dip, Lucy's proboscideans are totally at home in the water, rather like a hippo of today. The support and security of water enables them to be reimagined with bigger bodies and sturdier limbs, using their flexible proto-trunks to snag juicy vegetation from the lagoon/river bank as they float along...

So is this the final face of Moeritherium? Perhaps but, as Alex Liu of Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences [who led the research] tells me, the race is now on to discover exactly when these amphibious ancestors gave up their semi-aquatic lifestyle and took to the land to become the giants of the savannah we know today: there's plenty more reimagining of other early elephants to come.

Your comments

• Elephant and cat

  Nasrin Azadeh-McGuire | 18 Apr 08

  I wish to investigate coefficient of correlation - in terms of nutrition...

• Post a comment