Deinotherium was a giant relative of elephants with a feature no living animal shares: its only tusks grew from the lower jaw and curved down and back under its chin. It lived from about 13 million to about 1 million years ago across Europe, southern Asia and Africa, and the largest individuals stood about 4 m at the shoulder, well above an average African elephant bull. Its name means “terrible beast”. Its family split from the line that leads to modern elephants more than 44 million years ago, so it was a distant cousin of them, not an ancestor.
Four metres at the shoulder
The most detailed size estimates come from a 2016 study by Larramendi, who rebuilt skeletons as volumetric models. Several fairly complete skeletons of Deinotherium proavum from eastern Europe all come out at about 3.65 m at the shoulder and 10.5 tonnes. Fully grown Deinotherium giganteum could reach about 4 m and 12 tonnes, roughly twice the weight of an African bush elephant, whose bulls average about 3.2 m. The African species, Deinotherium bozasi, stood over 3.6 m and weighed about 9 tonnes.
It was not simply a scaled-up elephant. Its legs were longer and slimmer in proportion, its neck a little longer, and its skull short, low and flat on top, without the high dome of an elephant’s head. Its ancestor Prodeinotherium was much smaller: about 2 m at the shoulder in one summary, and about 2.5 to 2.8 m in Larramendi’s models of two European skeletons. A 2025 study led by Ruiz estimated that a 10.5-tonne Deinotherium could reach about 17 to 18 km/h, while warning that the method is less reliable for animals so distantly related to living elephants.
What the downturned tusks were for
The front of the lower jaw was long and bent sharply downwards, and the two tusks emerged about halfway round that curve. In some animals they carried on curving backwards into an almost semicircular hook; in others they pointed nearly straight down. They could reach 1.4 m. There were no tusks in the upper jaw at all.
The tusks were probably used in feeding rather than for digging. Markov and colleagues proposed that the animal pulled obstructing branches aside with them while its trunk moved leaves to its mouth. Wear on the cheek teeth of Deinotherium giganteum shows it browsed on the leaves of broad-leaved plants, and a 2023 study by Saarinen and Lister found that deinotheres kept the same simple, low-crowned browsing teeth throughout their history. They preferred open woodland.
The trunk is less certain. A large nasal opening shows there was one, but Markov and colleagues argued that it was short and muscular, unlike an elephant’s. Larramendi agreed that the neck and jaw point towards a shorter trunk, but argued that legs this long still called for one that could reach the ground to feed and drink, and judged a trunk of medium length the most plausible.
A jaw, a hoax and an aquatic giant
Kaup named Deinotherium in 1829 from a broken lower jaw found in sands near Eppelsheim in south-west Germany. He first reconstructed the tusks pointing upwards and corrected this several years later. Cuvier had already described its teeth in 1822 as belonging to “giant tapirs”, and in the 1830s Straus-Dürckheim and Buckland suggested it lived in water, Buckland picturing it clinging to riverbanks with its tusks. Older still, giant bones said to have been found near Montrigaud in France in 1613 and shown as the remains of a king called Theutobochus were recognised centuries later as Deinotherium.
The last of the deinotheres
Deinotheres spread from Africa into Eurasia over a land bridge that formed about 18 to 19 million years ago. Fossils of Deinotherium in India span about 13.5 to 8 million years ago, and in Europe it appeared about 13 to 11 million years ago and lasted until the end of the Miocene, about 6 to 5 million years ago. A fragment of upper arm bone from southern Finland may show that it ranged that far north, although the identification is provisional.
Africa was its last refuge. Deinotherium bozasi lived in East Africa, at sites such as Olduvai, Omo and Koobi Fora, into the Early Pleistocene. Saarinen and Lister date the extinction of the deinotheres to about 1.5 million years ago; other summaries give about 1 million. Its disappearance was part of a wider decline of large browsing animals as grasslands spread across Africa.
