Platybelodon sp.
Miocene
Gansu Province
China

Gorgeous, big 1050mm x 650mm (42 inch x 26 inch – nearly 4 feet!) skull of a female shovel-tusked mastodon. Includes a custom stand. Email for shipping – this thing is big and heavy so it requires special handling. Very little repair, mostly crack repair and stabilizing with preservative. Rare.

Platybelodon is a genus belonging to the Order Proboscidea, which includes the modern elephant and its relatives. You can’t really call it an “elephant” because it belongs to a separate family so it’s more of an offshoot of that lineage. Besides, unlike an elephant, it had both lower jaw tusks and upper jaw tusks with a bigger mouth too.

Platybelodon, which lived during the Middle Miocene, has been long-considered a “shovel-tusker” using its odd lower tusks to scoop up vegetation in swamps but a close study of the wear on the tusks indicates that these animals stripped bark, twigs, and leaves from trees instead.

An excellent display piece.

See: “The gomphotheriid mammal Platybelodon from the Middle Miocene of Linxia Basin, Gansu, China” (PDF)

Also: Platybelodon – Wikipedia