Extinct Elephant Graveyard From 5 Million Years Ago Unearthed; Burial Ground Has the Most Complete Gomphothere Skeletons

An astonishing find was made by paleontologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History when they unearthed a cemetery of ancient elephant ancestors stretching back 5 million years.

Extinct Elephant Gomphotheres' Remains Found

According to articles on the museum's blog, Jonathan Bloch, the curator of vertebrate paleontology, found the bones early last year at the Montbrook Fossil Dig site in Levy County. The remains were one of the most complete gomphothere skeletons ever discovered in North America. Bloch told the Pensacola News Journal that the discovery was "a once-in-a-lifetime find," Newsweek reported.

Gomphotheres - an extinct group of proboscideans linked to modern elephants - presumably perished around 5 million years ago. The outlet reported that it didn't take long for specialists to realize the graveyard contained remains and multiple complete skeletons of gomphotheres.

Dean Warner, a former chemistry teacher, and Montbrook volunteer, told the News Journal that he started coming upon one after another of toe and ankle bones. He dug further, and the ulna and radius began to emerge. They were all aware that they had discovered something remarkable.

According to the museum's blog post, the crew found most specimens on top of one huge skeleton, which was challenging because the specimens were mostly juveniles. The tall skeleton measures about 8 feet.

The finding is not rare for the location. It is, however, the most complete.

Rachel Narducci, the collection manager of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum, told the News Journal she doesn't think this was a situation in which the animals all died simultaneously. Modern elephants roam in herds and can be fiercely protective of their young. It appears that different herds were trapped in the location at different times.

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What Is Gomphothere?

Gomphothere is a member of the line of extinct elephants from the late Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) and early Holocene (11,700 years ago to the present) epochs. They were the most numerous group of the order Proboscidea and may have existed as early as the end of the Oligocene Epoch (33.9 million to 23 million years ago), according to Britannica.

They lived in marshes, woods, and grasslands, and some species developed highly specialized teeth for grazing and browsing in each habitat. Gomphotheres had a trunk, or proboscis, that evolved from the nose and upper lip, just like modern elephants. Some species possessed snouts the length of an elephant, while others had shorter snouts that resembled tapirs. Gomphotheres' most notable features included their tusks, modified second incisors extending downward from the upper jaw, and two tusks extending upward from the lower jaw.

It is currently unclear how gomphotheres fit into the phylogenetic tree of Proboscidea and how their systematics and phylogenetic relationships relate. An ongoing study attempts to shed light on the group's evolutionary background. In the past, Gomphotheriidae was used to group specimens that could not be assigned to Elephantidae or Stegodontidae, creating a paraphyletic group. A phylogenetic analysis of 19 gomphotheres (Shoshani 1996) found that 15 belonged to the same clade, but this clade was not strongly supported, per Berkeley.