Phanagoroloxodon mammontoides

Phanagoroloxodon mammontoides is the one species of an extinct genus of elephant, described from a partial skull of probable Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene age found on the banks of the Psekups river in the northwestern Caucasus of Russia. The skull was found in the collections of a museum in Krasnodar by Wadim Garutt in 1957, and he named it that year. It combines traits of Elephas and mammoths, with a saddle-like groove along the top of the skull, a rounded nasal process, almost no tubercles at the back of the skull and tusks suggested to be twisted. A second species named in 2005 from Kazakhstan may be a specimen of the steppe mammoth.