When you purchase through links on our internet site , we may earn an affiliate commissioning . Here ’s how it works .
About 66 million eld ago , an asteroid collided with Earth , wiping out the dinosaurs and giving a group of small mundane herbivores a wonderful evolutionary chance . With dinosaur ( except bird ) out of the painting , an untold number of niches were dead useable . Descendants of those mammal , which belong to a taxonomic grouping scientists call Paenungulata , circularize across the world and evolved into some of the most well - know mammals — aliveness and extinct — that have ever roamed Earth or swim its sea , Advait Jukar , a paleobiologist at the National Museum of Natural story at the Smithsonian in Washington , D.C. , told Live Science . The most far-famed is the elephant .
Though some of these strange creatures look like the enormous , beloved beasts , you ’d be shock to take that others are also tie in to the telluric giants of today . From the ocean cow to the hyrax , here are seven surprising , long - lost relatives of elephants .
A picture taken on 30 March 2025 shows an elephant in Mikumi National Park, which borders the Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania.
Species: Pezosiren
condition : Went extinct 40 million old age ago
Last common ancestor to elephants:60 million years ago
This four - legged mammalian was closely related to manatees , dugongs and the recently extinctSteller ’s sea cow , but fossils indicate that thepezosirenwasn’t as well suited to aquatic life as its relative were . paleontologist guess this long - tailed guy cable , whose remains were unearth in the country of Jamaica , existed for a short time between 40 million and 50 million years ago .
Pezosirenshared a remote ascendent with elephant , hyraxes and other sea cows . That long - miss fauna evolved in Africa and witness its way to the New World very too soon . Scientists hypothesise that an ancestral panungulate may have made the journeying by floating across the Atlantic on large rafts of vegetation . Back then , the trip would have been scant , as the ancient Atlantic was much narrower at that time than it is today .
Species: Manatee
condition : Endangered
Another descendant of the ancestral panungulate is the manatee ( Trichechus ) , found today on both sides of the Atlantic . One species lives in West Africa and two last in the New World : one in the Amazon and the other in rivers and coastlines in Florida . All sea cows , including manatees , evolved from pig - corresponding animals that move from land into the sea , and the last ancestor they partake with elephant lived about 60 million years ago .
Species: Dugong
Status : Vulnerable
Dugongs(Dugong dugon ) are a nautical sea moo-cow and live in tropical water , from the Red Sea to the coastlines of Australia and New Guinea . Like all panungulates , dugongs are herbivore that share pernicious anatomical features , such as cheek os that tend to flare out and sealed characteristics of the osseous tissue in their internal auricle .
Dugongs can rise up to 10 feet ( 3 metre ) long and survive for a whopping 70 years , harmonize to National Geographic . Some historians believe that dugong sightingshelped inspire the mythabout mermaids and mermen .
Species: Steller’s sea cow
Status : go extinct in the 18th century
The Steller ’s ocean moo-cow was a marine ocean cow that lived in the Bering Sea until the eighteenth century , when Europeans hound them into extinction . The naive creatures were 25 to 30 pes ( 7.6 to 9.1 meter ) in distance , making them the magnanimous of the sea cattle and especially desirable for their meat . The herbivore would float to the aerofoil to exhaust kelp , making them easy target area . Steller ’s ocean moo-cow were driven to defunctness in less than 30 years after their discovery by Europeans .
Species: Woolly mammoth
Status : Went extinct about 4,000 years ago
Last common ancestor to elephants:6 million long time ago
The wooly mammoth is perhaps the most well - know extinct mammal , but the charismatic creature was n’t around for very long . As member of the family Elephantidae , woolly mammoths were themselves elephant . Their last common ancestor with modern - day elephants last somewhere in Africa about 6 million years ago . scientist recollect woolly mammoths evolve about 700,000 year ago from populations of steppe mammoth be in Siberia . Wooly mammoth were roaming Earth ’s northern parallel of latitude during the grammatical construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza .
The last mammoths live on on island off the coast of Alaska and Siberia and fall dupe to human natural action .
Species: Columbian mammoth
Columbian mammoths were giants that roamed North America in thePleistocene . During a point of glaciation , sea levels drip , allowing populations to spread onto Santa Rosa Island off the sea-coast of California . The Columbian mammoth that ventured onto the island were maroon as the glaciers withdraw and sea level rose once again . scientist intend that limited distance and resources favored smaller individuals and eventually led to the creation of a Modern , much smaller metal money , ring thepygmy mammoth .
Weighing less than a ton , the members of the new mintage were less than one - ten percent the mass of their mainland ancestors .
Species: Hyrax
Status : Least concern , near threatened ( depending on metal money )
Hyraxes are small , furred mammals that more closely resemble rodents than elephants . Though their bodies are dissimilar in some way , hyraxes share some important feature with elephant , including certain dental gadget characteristic , the arrangement of off-white in their radiocarpal joint and ankles , and the absence seizure of external testicles . Though there were once many metal money , only five subsist today .
cony are aboriginal to Africa and southwestern Asia . They typically drop their morning hours sun and chowing down with their kin on skunk , leaves , yield , insects , lizards and bird eggs , according to the African Wildlife Foundation . They even have fate potties — that is , latrines where the whole household does its toilet business .
Species: Arsinoitherium
Status : plump Extinct30 MillionYears Ago
Relationship to elephants : Uncertain
fogy suggest this two - horn creature live in swamp in Africa and Asia about 56 million to 23 million year ago . Fossils discovered in2008suggest that Arsinoitherium was able to travel between the African continent and the Arabian Peninsula . Scientists have know for a prospicient time that the metal money was n’t nearly relate to the rhinoceros , but until recently paleobiologists believe that Arsinoitherium was a member of Paenungulata . Recent inquiry has pass researchers tothinkthat it is less tight related to elephants than the other animals in this demonstration .
Originally published onLive Science .
