If elephants were extinct, what would scientists have reconstructed from fossils look like? It's an interesting question, and we're going to talk about it below.
Ensuring that a sufficient number of fossils are collected is a crucial first step in the process of paleontological restoration, as the fossils left behind by paleontology are largely fragmented and fragmented, and may even come from multiple different individuals.
Once enough fossils have been collected, scientists will sort, identify, and organize them to construct a complete skeletal structure, and if all goes well, the elephant skeleton will look like this:
After constructing a complete skeletal structure, scientists will compare it with modern known organisms, look for extant species that are similar to them as a reference, and then based on the relevant theories of biology, combined with a certain amount of imagination, scientists can preliminarily speculate on some characteristics that elephants may have.
After this step is completed, the initial restoration of the elephant by scientists may look like this:
It can be seen that such "elephants" are very different from actual elephants, especially without the elephant's iconic long trunk, why? The reason is simple, that is, the trunk of the elephant belongs to soft tissue, and in the process of fossil formation, soft tissue is extremely difficult to preserve.
So, does this mean that scientists can't reconstruct an elephant's long trunk from fossils? Not necessarily. Because in more in-depth research, scientists should be able to find some clues related to the long trunks of elephants.
First of all, it is easy to tell from the teeth of elephants that they are herbivores (after all, the teeth of carnivores and herbivores are very different), and on this basis, scientists will think about the question: how do elephants eat grass and drink?
From the skeletal structure of elephants, it can be analyzed that their limbs are about the same length, and their forelimbs do not have flexible phalanges, which indicates that they should be animals on all fours, and it is impossible to use their forelimbs to complete the actions of eating grass and drinking water.
But what is clear is that elephants must have access to food and water, and how do they do it? Do they bow their heads? The answer is no, because their necks are so short compared to their tall size that their mouths are far from reaching the ground, no matter how much they look down.
Can they eat grass and drink water by lying on their stomachs? No, because they can't get down at all with their long teeth......
So it's reasonable to assume that elephants are supposed to graze and drink through a highly specialized part of their body, which is likely to be located on their head. What could it be? Or we can speculate that they have a very long jaw that looks like this:
But the problem is that if this is the case, their highly specialized jaws should be supported by related bones, so that in the fossils they left behind, there should be some findings, but in reality, elephants do not have such bones, so this speculation is not valid.
It is worth mentioning that in the past on the earth, there really existed an animal with an extremely elongated jaw, they were called "shovel-toothed elephants", which lived more than 10 million years ago, and the fossils left by "shovel-toothed elephants" are actually like this:
After ruling out the possibility of a lower jaw, there are probably only three "options" for the elephant's head that may be highly specialized: the nose, the ears, and the tongue.
Either way, it must be long and powerful, which requires the support of strong muscles, although muscles are also soft tissues, but a lot of tendon movement and weight-bearing will cause more obvious marks or deformations on the corresponding muscle attachment points on the elephant's skull, which will then be reflected in the fossil.
So with enough fossils, scientists should be able to find clues left by elephant trunk muscles on their fossilized skulls, and then speculate that elephants probably used their long, powerful snouts to eat grass and drink water.
It is important to know that there are actually some animals with long snouts on the modern earth, such as tapirs (as shown in the picture above), although their trunks are not as long as elephants and are not as flexible as elephants, their trunks still have a certain "grasping" function, so scientists may also use these animals as a reference when restoring elephants.
After a thorough analysis of the elephant, scientists begin the final restoration, in which scientists conduct in-depth research and reasoning about the elephant's bone structure, muscle morphology, skin characteristics, and other details, and use computer simulations to transform the information contained in the elephant fossil into a complete model.
In an ideal world, the elephant that scientists eventually reconstruct might look like this:
It's important to note that this is only an ideal scenario, and even in this case, there are differences between the elephants that scientists have recovered from fossils and the actual elephants, especially the ears. There is no way to do this, because elephant ears are also soft tissues, and they cannot leave their own traces on their fossils.