''Palaeoloxodon naumanni'', occasionally called Naumann's elephant, is an extinct species belonging to the genus ''

Palaeoloxodon ''Palaeoloxodon'' is an extinct genus of elephant. The genus originated in Africa during the Pliocene era, and expanded into Eurasia during the Pleistocene era. The genus contains some of the largest known species of elephants, over four metres t ...

'' found in the Japanese archipelago during the Middle to Late Pleistocene around 430,000 to 24,000 years ago. It is named after

Heinrich Edmund Naumann Heinrich Edmund Naumann (September 11, 1854 – February 1, 1927) was a German geologist, regarded as the "father of Japanese geology" in Meiji period Japan. Biography Heinrich Edmund Naumann was hired by the Meiji government in 1875 as a fo ...

who discovered the first fossils at Yokosuka, Kanagawa,

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. Fossils attributed to ''P. naumanni'' are also known from

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

and Korea, though the status of these specimens are unresolved, with some authors regarding these as belonging to separate species.

Description

''Palaeoloxodon naumanni,'' like other members of the genus ''

'' had a pair of long straight tusks and a parietal-occipital crest on the top of the head. These tusks grew more than 2.4 m in length, 20 cm in diameter. It was a little smaller than Asian elephants averaging to . It lived in forest which mixed subarctic

conifer Conifers are a group of conifer cone, cone-bearing Spermatophyte, seed plants, a subset of gymnosperms. Scientifically, they make up the phylum, division Pinophyta (), also known as Coniferophyta () or Coniferae. The division contains a single ...

s and cool-temperate

deciduous tree In the fields of horticulture and Botany, the term ''deciduous'' () means "falling off at maturity" and "tending to fall off", in reference to trees and shrubs that seasonally shed leaves, usually in the autumn; to the shedding of petals, afte ...

s. The ancestor of ''Palaeoloxodon naumanni'' moved from the Eurasian continent to Japan via a land bridge; it subsequently evolved independently and spread throughout Japan after the land bridge was covered by rising seawaters. ''Palaeoloxodon naumanni'' was hunted by the inhabitants of the time. Some fossils were found around Lake Nojiri in

Nagano Prefecture is a landlocked prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshū. Nagano Prefecture has a population of 2,052,493 () and has a geographic area of . Nagano Prefecture borders Niigata Prefecture to the north, Gunma Prefecture to the ...

, together with many lithic and bone tool artifacts. The range of ''P. naumanni'' extends across the Japanese archipelago, north to Hokkaido, where during the Late Pleistocene it alternated with the woolly mammoth during warmer intervals. Remains from mainland China and Korea have been attributed to this species by some authors. However, other authors attribute the Chinese remains, which are considerably larger than Japanese ''P. naumanii'', to the separate species '' P. huaihoensis.''

Discovery and nomenclature

In 1860, the first fossil record was found at Yokosuka and the bottom of

Seto Inland Sea The , sometimes shortened to the Inland Sea, is the body of water separating Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū, three of the four main islands of Japan. It serves as a waterway connecting the Pacific Ocean to the Sea of Japan. It connects to Osaka ...

, Japan.

researched and reported these fossils in “''Ueber japanische Elephanten der Vorzeit''” (1882). Naumann classified the fossil as ''Elephas namadicus'' Falconer & Cautley. In 1924, researched fossils which were found in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka and reported the elephant was a new subspecies and designated the fossil ''Elephas namadicus naumannni'' in “Notes on a fossil elephant from Sahamma, Totomi” (1924). Tadao Kamei identified ''Elephas namadicus naumanni'' as a new species, called ''Palaeoloxodon naumanni'', from fossils found at Lake Nojiri. It has also been called ''Elephas naumanni''.

Evolution and extinction

The oldest known dates for the species are from

MIS MIS or mis may refer to: Science and technology * Management information system * Marine isotope stage, stages of the Earth's climate * Maximal independent set, in graph theory * Metal-insulator-semiconductor, e.g., in MIS capacitor * Minimally in ...

12, around 430 kya, where it replaces ''

Stegodon orientalis ''Stegodon'' ("roofed tooth" from the Ancient Greek words , , 'to cover', + , , 'tooth' because of the distinctive ridges on the animal's molars) is an extinct genus of proboscidean, related to elephants. It was originally assigned to the famil ...

'', which had arrived from mainland East Asia several hundred thousand years prior. The youngest dates for the species are around 24 kyr Before Present, during the early stages of the

Last Glacial Maximum The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), also referred to as the Late Glacial Maximum, was the most recent time during the Last Glacial Period that ice sheets were at their greatest extent. Ice sheets covered much of Northern North America, Northern Eur ...

. Any younger dates were considered unreliable.

References

External links

{{Taxonbar, from=Q1593261 Palaeoloxodon Pleistocene proboscideans Pleistocene mammals of Asia Extinct animals of Japan Fossil taxa described in 1924

Description

Discovery and nomenclature

Evolution and extinction

See also

References

External links