The Biggest Elephants Ever Shrank to the Size of a Dog

Its ancestors may have been the biggest land mammals that ever lived. Then some of them got trapped on islands… and shrank to the size of a big dog. 🐘➡️🐕 Meet Palaeoloxodon, the straight-tusked elephants. Giants with a built-in "headband" on their skulls, hunted by Neanderthals, swimming to Mediterranean islands, and maybe even the real reason ancient people believed in the one-eyed Cyclops. Professor Dodo is your host, Professor Neander drops by (he insists his people had manners), and Tundra finds out she's not the biggest elephant in the family. 🦈 Missed our last Lost Giants episode? Watch Megalodon, the biggest shark that ever lived. 0:00 The one-eyed skull 0:32 Part 1: Out of Africa 1:11 Part 2: The giant 2:11 Part 3: The biggest land mammal ever? 3:06 Part 4: The hunters 3:48 Part 5: How a giant turned tiny 5:09 Part 6: The Cyclops 5:58 Part 7: The end of the giants 6:46 Their living cousin 📚 Sources Giant straight-tusked elephants and their skulls (University of Bristol, 2020) Straight-tusked elephant & Palaeoloxodon namadicus (Wikipedia, with original studies cited there) Straight-tusked elephant DNA (Meyer et al. 2017; Palkopoulou et al. 2018) Neanderthals hunted straight-tusked elephants (Gaudzinski-Windheuser et al. 2023, Science Advances) Palaeoloxodon namadicus body mass (Biswas, Chang & Tsai 2024) Kashmir Palaeoloxodon skull and 87 stone tools (Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2024) Dwarf elephants the size of dogs (Discover Wildlife) Birth of a monster: the Cyclops (EarthDate) Europe's climate could still support straight-tusked elephants (Journal of Biogeography) Tiny hippos and elephants of Cyprus (ScienceAlert) #palaeoloxodon #elephant #extinctanimals #iceage #cyclops #dwarfelephant #lostgiants