Stegodon

Stegodon Temporal range: Late Miocene–Late Pleistocene, 11.6–0.01 Ma PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N
Stegodon skeleton at the Gansu Provincial Museum
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Proboscidea
Family:	†Stegodontidae
Genus:	†Stegodon Falconer, 1847
Species
†S. aurorae (Matsumoto, 1918) †S. elephantoides (Clift, 1828) †S. florensis Hooijer, 1957 †S. ganesha (Faloner and Cautley, 1846) †S. kaisensis Hopwood, 1939 †S. luzonensis von Koenigswald, 1956 †S. miensis (Matsumoto, 1941) †S. mindanensis (Naumann, 1890) †S. orientalis Owen, 1870 †S. protoaurorae (Aiba et al., 2010) †S. sompoensis Hooijer, 1964 †S. sondaari van den Bergh, 1999 †S. trigonocephalus (Martin, 1887) †S. zdanskyi Hopwood, 1935

Stegodon ("roofed tooth" from the Ancient Greek words στέγω, stégō, 'to cover', + ὀδούς, odoús, 'tooth' because of the distinctive ridges on the animal's molars) 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 mammutids.^[1] Fossils of the genus are known from Africa and across much of Asia, as far southeast as Timor (with a single record in southeast Europe). The oldest fossils of the genus are found in Late Miocene strata in Asia, likely originating from the more archaic Stegolophodon, subsequently migrating into Africa.^[2] While the genus became extinct in Africa during the Pliocene, Stegodon persisted in South, Southeast and Eastern Asia into the Late Pleistocene.^[3]