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Palaeomastodonfossils have been found in Africa, where they lived some 36-35 million years ago. They are believed to be the ancestors of elephants-or mastodons. Palaeomastodon lived in marshy semi aquatic swamps during the middle late Eocene to the early Oligocene. It may have used its upper pair of tusks for scraping bark off trees. Palaeomastodon was a very early form of elephant and thus had a very short trunk.

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Gomphotheres were early elephants that looked different from modern elephants. Gomphotheres had 4 tusks; 2 straight ones in the upper jaw and 2 straight ones in the lower jaw. Unlike elephants today, the upper tusks were coated with enamel. Gomphothere teeth had very high ridges, which were ideal for grinding very tough foods, like branches. The skull of Gomphotheres were also elongated and they had shorter legs and a more barrel shaped body than modern elephants.

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These primitive elephant is are thought to be the common ancestor of Mammuthus, the mammoths, and the closely allied genera Elephas and Loxodonta, the Asian and African elephants, diverging some 4-6 million years ago. It had four tusks, which is a trait not shared with its descendants, but common in earlier proboscideans. The type species, Primelephas gomphotheroides, was described by Vincent Maglio in 1970, with the specific epithet indicating the fossil specimens were gomphothere-like.

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The type genus of the family, Anancus, was named by Auguste Aymard in 1855. It was traditionally allocated to Gomphotheriidae, but was later assigned to the family Elephantidae by McKenna and Bell, Lambert and Shoshani, Kalb and Froelich, and Shoshani and Tassy.

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mastodon, any of several extinct elephantine mammals that first appeared in the early Miocene and continued in various forms through the Pleistocene Epoch. In North America, mastodons probably persisted into post-Pleistocene time and were thus contemporaneouswith Paleo-Indian groups. Mastodons had a worldwide distribution; their remains are quite common and are often very well preserved.

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Stegodon is an extinct genus of proboscidean, related to elephants. It was originally assigned to the family Elephantidae along with modern elephants but is now placed in the extinct family Stegodontidae. Like elephants, Stegodon had teeth with plate-like lophs that are different from those of more primitive proboscideans like gomphotheres and mastodons.The oldest fossils of the genus are found in Late Miocene strata in Asia, likely originating from the more archaic Stegolophodon, shortly afterwards migrating into Africa. While the genus became extinct in Africa during the Pliocene, Stegodonremained widespread in Asia until the end of the Pleistocene.

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mammoth, (genus Mammuthus), any member of an extinct group of elephants found as fossils in Pleistocene deposits over every continent except Australia and South America and in early Holocene deposits of North America. (The Pleistocene Epoch began 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago. The Holocene Epoch began 11,700 years ago and continues through the present.)

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mammoth, (genus Mammuthus), any member of an extinct group of elephants found as fossils in Pleistocene deposits over every continent except Australia and South America and in early Holocene deposits of North America. (The Pleistocene Epoch began 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago. The Holocene Epoch began 11,700 years ago and continues through the present.)

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The Asian elephant, also known as the Asiatic elephant, is the only living species of the genus Elephas and is distributed throughout the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, from India in the west, Nepal in the north, Sumatra in the south, and to Borneo in the east.

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African elephants are a genus comprising two living elephant species, the African bush elephant and the smaller African forest elephant. Both are social herbivores with grey skin, but differ in the size and colour of their tusks and in the shape and size of their ears and skulls.