Mammuthus meridionalis
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Mammuthus meridionalis Temporal range: 2.5–1.5 Ma |
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| Mounted skeleton, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Proboscidea |
| Family: | Elephantidae |
| Genus: | Mammuthus |
| Species: | M. meridionalis |
| Binomial name | |
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Mammuthus meridionalis (Nesti, 1825) |
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Mammuthus meridionalis, or the southern mammoth, is an extinct species of mammoth endemic to Europe and Central Asia from the Gelasian stage of the Early , living from 2.5–1.5 mya.
The taxonomy of extinct elephants was complicated by the early 20th century, and in 1942, Henry Fairfield Osborn's posthumous monograph on the Proboscidea was published, wherein he used various taxon names that had previously been proposed for mammoth species, including replacing Mammuthus with Mammonteus, as he believed the former name to be invalidly published. Mammoth taxonomy was simplified by various researchers from the 1970s onwards, all species were retained in the genus Mammuthus, and many proposed differences between species were instead interpreted as intraspecific variation.
The earliest known members of Proboscidea, the clade which contains modern elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea. The closest known relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians (dugongs and manatees) and the hyraxes (an order of small, herbivorous mammals). The family Elephantidae existed six million years ago in Africa and includes the modern elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon (Mammut) is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate family Mammutidae, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved. The following cladogram shows the placement of the genus Mammuthus among other proboscideans, based on characteristics of the hyoid bone in the neck:
†Mammutidae (Mastodons)
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