Restoration of the world series of elephants and mastodons

Abstract

Under the author’s direction the animal sculptor Mr. Charles R. Knight has been engaged during the past two years on a series of models of the elephants and mastodons to a uniform scale of 1½ inches to the foot, or a one-eighth scale. Three living and three extinct types have been completed, and the series will finally include the ancestral proboscidian stages as far back as Palaeomastodon, all to the same scale. The standards of shoulder height of the recent forms are taken from the well known records of Rowland Ward (1907), and the estimates of shoulder height of extinct forms are taken partly from actual skeletons, as in the case of the mastodon and woolly mammoth, and from fore-limb measurements in the case of the imperial mammoth. These heights in descending order are as follows: Imperial mammoth, Elephas imperator, 13 feet 6 inches, estimate of F. A. Lucas.African . . .