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Where do elephants and chalicotheres come from?

Thursday, August 20, 2026 14:25

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The deep ancestry of elephants and chalicotheres
have recently come to light in the large reptile tree (LRT, 2340 taxa, Fig 1).

Prior and traditional hypotheses are expressed and exposed bellow.

Figure 1. In the LRT the last common ancestor of chalicotheres and elephants is Homalodotherium, then Phenacodus. Click to enlarge.

Wait a minute!!!
Chalicotheres and elephants? Is this a false premise? No. Let’s look in on this.

According to Google AI
“Chalicotheres and elephants are both large, extinct or extant herbivorous mammals, but they belong to entirely different major branches of the mammalian family tree and look drastically different”

The word ‘different’ and the phrase ‘drastically different‘ are subjective. So, let’s make the process more scientific, more precise and less aesthetic.

Better to run your own analysis to find out for yourself the closest tested ancestors of elephants and/or chalicotheres. Don’t omit Homalodotherium.

Let’s say
drastically different is a good yardstick. AI also indicates, “Elephants: Belong to the order Proboscidea, which is part of the supercohort Afrotheria, making them closely related to aardvarks, manatees, and hyraxes rather than odd-toed ungulates.”

So, aardvarks, manatees and hyraxes are NOT considered drastically different in the world of AI? See the problem?

That’s why the LRT was created: to find out the closest relatives of elephants after testing from among all the taxa = choices available

Logan, according to Google AI and college textbooks.
“Chalicotheres: belong to the order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates), making them distant cousins to modern horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs”

This traditional view, comes with the traditional proviso that chalicotheres lack hooves, a primitive trait shared by perissodactyls and artiodactyls.

That’s why the LRT was created: to find out the closest relatives of chalicotheres after testing from among all the taxa = choices available

Figure 2. Homalodotherium had claws. It was basal to chalicotheres and elephants in the current LRT.

Turns out
in the LRT chalicotheres and elephants are each others’ closest relatives. Clawed Homalodotherium (Figs 1, 2) is their current least common ancestor. This taxon never seems to appear in the short list of chalicothere and elephant deep ancestors in prior publications.

That’s the value of the LRT: Fewer taxa are omitted. More are included.

Figure 3. From several years ago, Phenacodus (above and in yellow) conmpared to Elephas (below). Chalicotheres and Homalodotherium are transitional and related taxa between these two.

The LRT recovers
chalicothere and elephant ancestors back to monotremes. basal synapsids and even Cambrian worms. It’s a powerful tool. It can be falsified.

Now the LRT needs testing with an independent cladogram based on a similar taxon list.

According to Wikipedia,
“Homalodotherium is an extinct genus of South American native ungulates in the order Notoungulata. It had a proportionally small head with broad, flat, teeth, and, unusually for South American native ungulates, large claws on its forelimbs.”

The LRT does not nest Homalodotherium with notoungulates,
all of which had hooves, rather than claws.

“Initially, it was suggested that these were used for digging. However, it is more likely that they were instead used for pulling vegetation to within the range of the mouth, which may have been supplemented by a prehensile upper lip (indicated by its retracted nasal bones). In these regards, Homalodotherium is convergent with chalicotheres, a lineage of perissodactyls that may have similarly browsed from trees.”.

Maybe not ‘by convergence.’
And what is another name for a ‘prehensile upper lip’? How does ‘trunk’ sound?

The elephant trunk had to start small, then grow to present length.

Homalodotherium has been a traditionally omitted taxon – but not omitted in the LRT.

Don’t omit Homalodotherium from your own cladogram matrix.

Final consideration: Geography.
Homalodotherium and astraphotheres are both from South America. Chalicotheres and elephants have been found everywhere but South America. From the present data one can assume that elephants and chalicotheres had wandered off the continent of South America prior to the isolation imposed by the advent of the Atlantic Ocean.

That happened sometime in the Cretaceous.

So now we can (at this time) imagine Phenacodus and Homalodotherium (Fig 1) llving with and hoping to avoid bumping into giant theropod dinosaurs while Gondwana was still contiguous. Arguments to the contrary are welcome.

References
wiki/Elephant
wiki/Proboscidea
wiki/Chalicotheriidae
wiki/Homalodotherium

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2026/08/21/where-do-elephants-and-chalicotheres-come-from/

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