New Delhi: An elephant skull that researchers unearthed from Kashmir’s Pampore town in the year 2000 belonged to a “straight-tusked” Palaeoloxodon species, one of the largest known elephant species that ever lived, according to a study.
However, because of its difference from other skull specimens of the same species found in India and similarity to one recovered from Turkmenistan, the skull could “represent a distinct species that we previously knew very little about,” said lead author Advait Jukar, currently at the Florida Museum of Natural History, US.
While an elephant’s tusks are usually known to be curved, the straight-tusked elephant is an extinct species found in Europe and Western Asia, and it survived until at least 21,000 years ago, according to the Natural History Museum, UK.
The Kashmir skull was buried with 87 stone tools used by prehistoric humans, all of which were re-examined in March 2019 by the international team of researchers, including those from the University of Jammu.
They wanted to determine the species’ taxonomy (category), cause of death and if humans were involved in any way. The findings from the re-examination are published now in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
“From the general shape of the skull, it’s quite apparent that the elephant belonged to Palaeoloxodon, or straight-tusked elephants, among the largest land mammals that ever lived. Full-grown adults easily stood around four metres tall at the shoulder and weighed 9-10 tonnes,” says Steven Zhang, a palaeontologist from the Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Finland.
However, the Kashmir skull lacked a “thickened, forward-projecting crest at the skull roof”, typical of other Palaeoloxodon skulls found in India, Zhang said.
The researchers instead noticed that the Kashmir skull’s features conformed to those of another “obscure” skull from Turkmenistan that was studied in the 1950s and proposed to represent a distinct species ‘Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus’.
The Turkmen skull was found to have features similar to the known European species ‘Palaeoloxodon antiquus’, yet lack a prominent crest at its roof, because of which it was deemed as an aberration, according to the researchers.
However, the Kashmir skull provided support that the two skull specimens could represent a distinct species, they said.
“With the Kashmir skull added to the mix, it becomes clear now that the two specimens can be theorised to represent a distinct species that we previously knew very little about, with a broad distribution from Central Asia to the northern Indian Subcontinent,” Jukar said.
The researchers analysed protein decomposition in the tooth of the Kashmir skull to conclude that the skull dated to the Middle Pleistocene period 300,000-400,000 years ago — about the same estimated age as the Turkmen skull.
This supported the belief that the two skulls from Kashmir and Turkmen represent a species distinct from other Eurasian Palaeoloxodon, they said.
