Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus

Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus is an extinct species of elephant belonging to the genus Palaeoloxodon, known from the Middle Pleistocene of Central Asia and South Asia. It was described in 1955 from a partial adult skull, an atlas vertebra and a partial femur found at Khuday-Dag near Krasnovodsk in what is now western Turkmenistan. Its validity was long uncertain, and a 2004 study suggested it was a synonym of the straight-tusked elephant, but in 2024 a skull of a mature bull, aged about 45 to 55 years, from Galandhar near Pampore in the Kashmir Valley, India, was attributed to it, and that study affirmed it as a distinct species. The species had a large body size comparable to other mainland Eurasian Palaeoloxodon, and its parietal-occipital crest is only weakly developed, as in the African and West Asian Palaeoloxodon recki. The 2024 study proposed, tentatively, that it may be ancestral to other Eurasian Palaeoloxodon species.