Elephants are a cute animal, large, temperamental, and simple. Compared to other living mammals, the proboscis family is much more memorable because there are only three members under this family: the African savannah elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant.
Elephants are the largest creatures on land today, and even the smallest Asian elephants can reach 3 to 5 tons, while African forest elephants generally weigh more than 3.5 tons, and the largest African steppe elephants can weigh 5.5 to 8 tons. Looking at the history of life on Earth, we will find that being large is often not a good thing. In the short term, the size is large, no one can afford it, and safety is guaranteed, but in the long run, the huge size means huge food demand, which means that it is difficult to move, the difficulty of transfer, and the difficulty of coping with the sudden changes in the environment and climate, so in the history of the development of life on earth, those large creatures are all extinct. Elephants are an exception, not only surviving, but also surviving for 60 million years.
Why are elephants still standing after 60 million years? The reason is that they have evolved very successfully, and in the evolutionary path of elephants, the most successful point is its long nose.
If there is any animal other than primates, which animal is most likely to evolve intelligence, it is undoubtedly the elephant, because they have a flexible nose that is not inferior to the "hand", and their noses can basically do what the hand can do, so in the face of various existential crises, they have the ability to feed their huge bodies. But elephants didn't own the artifact from the beginning, and they weren't so large from the beginning, and the evolution of elephants dates back 60 million years, when their ancestors were still little ones. Elephant ancestors from 60 million years ago were called "akebodes", and although there is an "elephant" in the name, it is difficult to associate them with today's elephants, because they are about the same size as rabbits, the smallest is only 3 kilograms, and the largest is not more than 8 kilograms.
It was confirmed that this rabbit-sized creature was the ancestor of elephants because its molars had evolved some of the characteristics of later Eocene proboscis.
The time came 55 million years ago, when Archaeopteryx and apatite appeared, and the origin of the name of Archaeopteryx was because early people thought that Archaeopteryx was the ancestor of modern elephants, but later found apatite elephant, in contrast, the apatite elephant seems to be orthodox. Compared with aquastrophins, the size of the apatite elephant has increased significantly to more than 10 kg, but the long nose still does not appear.
In the later stages of the first stage of elephant evolution, the elephant family finally raised its eyebrows, and a large family member appeared, which was the dinosaur. The elephant weighs more than the modern elephant, more than 10 tons, and the nose is much longer than its ancestors, but it is not too long, and the front teeth have grown out, except that the ivory of the elephant is not a fang that bends upwards, but a hook-like tooth that bends downwards.
After the fear of elephants, the evolution of elephants officially entered the second stage, 30 million years ago, the ancient mastodon appeared, and began to spread globally, they even crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, since then, the elephant originated in Africa began to spread all over the world, except for Antarctica and Oceania, there have been elephant trails around the world.
Due to the sudden change in climate, the elephant family experienced a major blow from 14 million years ago, and many species of elephants became extinct, but after this baptism, the evolutionary path of elephants became more refined, and it was from this period that the elephant's nose became extremely flexible. 7 million years ago, an important member of the elephant family, the real elephant class appeared, and the most representative of them is the mammoth. Mammoths weighing 20 tons led the elephant family to the pinnacle until 3,000 years ago, when the last mammoths became extinct on islands in the Arctic Ocean in northeastern Russia.
Although there are only three types of elephants that still exist on earth and are facing a crisis, it is remarkable that they have been able to survive 60 million years of baptism to this day.
Whenever we look back at the evolutionary path of living things, we feel respect. Whenever the topic of evolution is mentioned, there are always people who oppose it, which is actually nothing, evolution is indeed a hypothesis, but it is undeniable that it is by far the most authoritative and well-evidenced hypothesis. Even today, organisms are still evolving, because the reproduction of organisms is very slow, evolution takes a long time, so most of the evolution of organisms, we can not see, but such as bacteria and viruses such as very fast reproduction of life forms, their evolution is obvious, the essence of evolution is random mutation.
In fact, evolution is not only the most well-documented hypothesis of the origin of life, but also the most logical hypothesis of the origin of life. Some people say that life on Earth was created by aliens, and some people support creationism, but this will put us in a dead cycle, and who created the aliens? Who created the so-called God? After all, there is a source, and this source should also be evolved, he can't always appear in the universe out of thin air with a "ding".