Which animal with a trunk lived in your county?

Mammoths are elephants. The deinothere, the mastodons and Anancus belong to older branches of the proboscideans, the “animals with a trunk”, which appeared before the mammoths; Anancus and Mammut borsoni lived for a while alongside the first mammoths. The rows below show the age of the layers where their bones were found here.

Pick an animal and your height. The dotted line shows where shoulder height is measured: at the top of the shoulder blade, with flesh on.

Which was the biggest? It depends on what you measure and who does the measuring. By the average size in Asier Larramendi's calculations (2016), the order by mass is: Mammut borsoni (410 cm at the shoulder, 16 t), the straight-tusked elephant (400 cm, 13 t), the big mammoths (400 cm, 11 t) and only then the deinothere (365 cm, 10.5 t). For the other three it is the average of adult males; for the deinothere, the average of both sexes.

Three reservations. All the values come from one author; newer studies repeat them. The order compares average-size estimates, not the largest individuals: for Deinotherium giganteum Larramendi gives up to 400 cm and 12 t, and for a Cretan deinothere, tentatively, 410 cm and over 14 t. From Romania we found no described skeleton of Mammut borsoni: we know a tooth, at Husnicioara, and other remains at Cernătești and in the Baraolt Basin. Its size comes from bones found in other countries, chiefly at Milia (Greece): the mean of 410 cm and 16 t rests on a single femur, and a composite restoration from two Milia individuals gives about 14 t. A magazine article gives 330–350 cm for one Milia bull, but says males of the species reached almost 4 m. And the Mânzați skeleton, 359 cm and 10.3 t, is a single animal, not the species average; its sex and age are not settled.

The 4.5 m that circulates in the press about the Antipa skeleton (Historia, Ziarul Națiunea) cannot be compared with these heights. It is probably a measurement of the mounted skeleton, taken at a point the texts do not give, and Larramendi notes that many mounted skeletons come out too tall because the shoulder blades are set too low. Press the button above to see the difference.

No whole tusk found in Romania has a published length in the sources read here. The longest tusk ever measured on a proboscidean comes from Greece, from a species whose remains are also found here.

The shape of the tusks is schematic; the length is the measured one. Those from Milia and Laiatico are upper tusks. The Milia lengths are measured along the outside of the curve; the source gives no straight-line length, and only the 4.39 m pair is described as almost straight. The Siliștea piece is a fragment of a lower tusk.

The deinothere has only lower tusks, curving downward. The tusks of a specimen of Prodeinotherium, a smaller, older species found in Switzerland, measure 53.5 cm (left) and 47.5 cm (right); they are the only deinothere tusks measured in the sources read here. For an adult Deinotherium we found no published length.

A 3.71 m Anancus tusk, attributed to a specimen from Stoina (Gorj), appears in an online encyclopedia with no scientific source we could read; that is why it is not on the ruler.

Grigoriu Ștefănescu named the deinothere. Sabba Ștefănescu named a mammoth. They were two different men, and both names first appeared abroad.

Grigoriu Ștefănescu (1836–1911) was the first professor of geology, mineralogy and palaeontology in Bucharest. In 1890 the Ministry of Education told him that the prefect of Tutova had reported large bones found at Mânzați. He set off at once for Bârlad, in mid-winter, on 28 January; the bones had already been broken up and shared among several neighbours. The digging went on for years; in 1906 a Belgian restorer, Louis de Pauw, mounted the skeleton in Bucharest.

He proposed the name Dinotherium gigantissimum in August 1891, at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Washington. The paper was read in French, followed by an oral summary in English; the text published in the 1892 volume is in English. The name rests on a molar received in 1878 from Găiceana, which had struck him as too large for the known species. Ștefănescu writes that the animal “may be named” gigantissimum: a cautious proposal, with no plate and no type specimen designated.

The Antipa museum's guide says otherwise: the skeleton is “the type specimen on which it was described”, and a 2013 press release calls it the “holotype”. The 1892 paper does not say so, and two recent studies, from 2008 and 2024, give Găiceana as the type locality. We could not verify whether the 1895 monograph designates a type specimen.

Recent studies, from 2024, treat the name gigantissimum as a junior synonym of Deinotherium proavum, a species described by Eichwald from Ukraine; some databases file it under Deinotherium giganteum, and a 2008 study kept the name gigantissimum. The Mânzați skeleton remains “celebrated”, as the 2024 study calls it, and Antipa shows it in its atrium.

The museum's guide says individuals of 5 m in height existed, without saying what the 5 m measures. In Larramendi's scheme the largest class for the species, estimated at fewer than one animal in 100,000, stops at 4.56 m of shoulder height in life. The age and sex of the Mânzați animal are not settled either: Ștefănescu thought it a young female, Larramendi restores it as an adult male, and a 2008 study lists it among adults.

Sabba Ștefănescu and the first mammoth

Sabba Ștefănescu (1857–1931), professor of palaeontology in Bucharest from 1905, published in December 1924, in Paris, a short note of about a page in which he calls a molar from Tulucești (Galați) “an ancestral mutation of Elephas antiquus”, named rumanus. He adds that he will not dwell on its characters for now. It was not the name of a mammoth.

The name was later moved to the genus Mammuthus. Not everyone agrees: a Russian researcher, following a 2008 study, treats it as a form of the straight-tusked elephant, and a 2023 review reports a proposal to assign most early Eurasian specimens only to the genus Mammuthus, without a species.

Was it the first European mammoth to be named?

No: the name from Romania came after those of the woolly, southern and steppe mammoths. What is true is something else: the oldest securely dated mammoth remains in Europe come from Tulucești and Cernătești.

Eight sentences. Some sound like a story and are true; others sound like common knowledge and are not.

The museums below hold material from Romania, according to the texts read. Not all of them display it all the time; ask before you travel.

• Bucharest, Antipa museum The Mânzați skeleton, in the ground-floor atrium, beside a skeleton of a young Indian elephant.
• Bârlad, “Vasile Pârvan” Museum Material from six Late Miocene localities in Vaslui, among them the Gherghești deinothere.
• Craiova, Museum of Oltenia A partial skull of a young Mammuthus meridionalis from Ghioroiu (Vâlcea) and the bones from Leu (Dolj).
• Roșiorii de Vede, “Petre Voivozeanu” Museum The partial Mammuthus meridionalis skeleton from Brebina (Teleorman).
• Oradea, Museum of the Crișuri Country The tusk fragment from Roșiori, tentatively assigned to the woolly mammoth.
• Arad, Timișoara, Buzău, Ploiești Mammoth teeth and fragments in museum collections: the molar from Zăbrani (Arad), the mammoth from the Timiș river at Bazoș, the tooth from Valea Nucului (Buzău), the molar from Urlați (Prahova).

We found no information about proboscideans on the own pages of the National Geological Museum or the Babeș-Bolyai University museums in Cluj, so they are not listed here; that does not mean they hold no pieces.