Elephants And Relatives

This group gathers Mammals subcategory members belonging to Afrotheria, a group of African-origin mammalian lineages united by DNA evidence rather than obvious shared appearance, spanning animals as different in size and habitat as the elephant and the manatee. It includes the elephant family, Proboscidea, the largest living land animals, along with their extinct relatives the mammoths, the sirenians, the manatees and dugong, fully aquatic herbivores sometimes called sea cows, and the hyraxes, small, rabbit-sized herbivores that are, despite their size, among the elephant's closest living relatives. What unites this otherwise visually mismatched set of animals is a shared African evolutionary origin and a cluster of subtle anatomical and genetic traits, including the position of the testes and details of tooth replacement, that molecular studies have confirmed only in recent decades.