Paraceratherium was a hornless relative of the rhinoceroses, and one of the largest mammals ever to walk on land. It lived across Eurasia, from China to the Balkans, between about 34 and 23 million years ago, in the epoch called the Oligocene, and the biggest individuals stood about 4.8 m at the shoulder, half again as tall as a large African elephant. With a long neck on top of that, it could feed from branches beyond the reach of smaller animals.
One animal, many names
The first fossils were described in 1908 from the Bugti Hills of what is now Pakistan, and the name Paraceratherium was given in 1911. Over the next decades, more bones turned up in Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan and elsewhere, and several of them were given names of their own. Two of them, Baluchitherium and Indricotherium, became famous in their own right. A 1989 revision placed them all in one genus, and Paraceratherium, as the oldest name, took precedence, although some later studies keep Indricotherium apart.
How big
Early estimates made it enormous: more than 8 m long and up to 30 tonnes. Those figures are now thought exaggerated. Current estimates put the largest individuals at about 4.8 m tall at the shoulder and about 7.4 m long, with weights of about 9 to 20 tonnes depending on the study and the species. Its skull alone was up to about 1.3 m long, and its neck 2 to 2.5 m.
It was built for height as well as bulk. The legs were long and straight like pillars, and the neck carried the head up into the trees, where it browsed on leaves, soft plants and shrubs. At the front of the mouth it had one pair of tusk-like incisors in each jaw, and it had lost its canines altogether.
A lip or a trunk?
Whether Paraceratherium had a trunk is still argued. The bones of its nose show a very deep notch, which means some kind of soft, mobile structure sat there. Many reconstructions give it a thick grasping lip. A study in 2021, which described a new species, Paraceratherium linxiaense, from about 26.5 million years ago in the Linxia Basin of Gansu, China, read the same notch as a sign of a short trunk. No skin or soft tissue is known, so the question cannot yet be settled.
The same study suggested that during the Oligocene the area of today’s Tibetan Plateau was lower than it is now, allowing these giants to move freely along the eastern shore of the ancient Tethys Ocean.
Life and death of a giant
Fully grown, Paraceratherium was probably too big for any predator on land. It may have lived in small herds, perhaps made up of females and their young, and its calves would have been vulnerable. Bite marks on some bones suggest that very large crocodiles may have preyed on even adults.
It disappeared at the end of the Oligocene, about 23 million years ago, and nobody knows why. One suggestion is that early relatives of elephants, arriving from Africa, changed the vegetation it relied on. Others point out that the two rarely lived side by side, and link its end instead to the arrival of new large predators and plant-eaters in Asia at the start of the next epoch, the Miocene.
