Practicum students unearth a mammoth ancestor
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-practicum-students-unearth-mammoth-ancestor.html
Andrey Spansky, assistant professor in the Department of Paleontology and Historical Geology, says that judging by the photographs, the upper teeth and bones are from the skull of a trogontherium elephant (steppe mammoth). It is the ancestor of woolly mammoths, which lived in large numbers in modern Siberia several tens of thousands of years ago. According to available data, the trogontherium elephant was one of the largest examples of a proboscis. It could reach 4.2 meters at the shoulders and it weighed up to 10 tons.
"It is also possible that the teeth found belong to the Khazar elephant, which is an intermediate evolutionary link between the trogontherium elephant and the woolly mammoth. This animal lived in the Middle Pleistocene (400-100 thousand years ago)," says Andrey Shpansky. The Khazar elephant also inhabited open spaces but was smaller in size. To determine more accurately what the remnants are, scientists need to study them and make measurements.