Mammuthus sungari

• China

Mammuthus Sungari ( to German as " mammoth from Songhua Jiang" ) has been described as an extinct species of elephants ( Elephantidae ) from the kind of mammoth (Mammuthus ). She lived during the Pleistocene in northern China and has been referred to as probably the greatest its kind ever produced the elephants. So they said to have had a shoulder height of 5.3 meters, a total length of 9.1 meters and a putative weight of 17 tons. This Mammuthus Sungari would be only slightly smaller than Paraceratherium, the largest land mammal proven. In the English -speaking world, the species is known as the " Songhua River Mammoth ".

Described Scientific Mammutart the first time in 1959 by Zhou and Zhang YP Mingzhen, based on skeletal remains that in a coal mine at Manjur in the prefecture-level city of Hulun Buir (Inner Mongolia, China) were recovered. It was assumed that she secede about 280,000 years ago from the steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii ), which in turn from Südelefanten (Mammuthus meridionalis, also Archidiskodon meridionalis ) is derived, and survived until the late Pleistocene. Parts of the bones were joined together to form skeletal reconstructions, two of which are inside the museum Mongolia, Hohhot ( capital of the autonomous province of Inner Mongolia, China) and are the third in Manjur.

The taxonomic independence of this type was mainly adopted by Chinese scientists due to the assumed enormous size and, compared with the simultaneously occurring woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius ), acting primitive morphological features, and occasionally researchers outside of China took on that name. New investigations and the comparison with neugefundenem material, such as from the river bed of the Wei He near Xi'an ( Shaanxi, China) showed a different picture. It is partially mixed archaeological material. The original features will occur largely on the steppe mammoth back, a small part of the existing fossil material is, however, also assigned to the woolly mammoth. The original description of Mammuthus Sungari was made without specifying a holotype. Furthermore, the description is based on highly fragmented material, as well as the subsequently reconstructed skeletons. Of these, skeletal reconstructions, only the former is completely in Manjur to 80% and has a body height of 4.33 m, what is the range of variation of the steppe mammoth. The teeth of these trunk species, especially the molars, which are frequently used for species-specific differentiation of the elephants show no significant deviations from those of the steppe mammoth. It is worth noting, however, that the finds from China indicate that the steppe mammoth in East Asia, in contrast to the Western Eurasian representatives, not extinct already 200,000 years ago, but here to the late Pleistocene survived - the molars were using the radiocarbon dating age values 25000-34000 years determined before today - and its habitat with the woolly mammoth shared.