Deinotherium – Lee Duigon

I’m getting antsy for Obann, and I want to flush the day’s nooze out of my brain… so let’s join Mr. Nature on a prehistoric safari.

Hi, Mr. Nature here–and the video is in Hindi, so I have no idea what the narrator is saying; but I know a Deinotherium when I see one. Well, okay, there are no more Deinotheriums, only pictures and video recreations.

These are related to the elephants we know and love today, and lived in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some of them were considerably bigger than modern elephants. Plus it looks like their tusks are on backwards. Deinotherium’s tusks were attached to the lower jaw instead of coming out of the upper, like an elephant’s.

We do not know how this animal used its tusks. Scraping bark off trees? Maybe. They look so much like elephants that the two must have had a lot in common. Except for those tusks. The more you look at them, the more puzzling it gets. What good did their tusks do them, down there?

But God the Designer doesn’t make mistakes, and doesn’t create living things that don’t work. However those tusks functioned, we can be sure they served the animal well.

Hi, Mr. Nature here–with another animal that I wish I could have seen in the flesh.

Deinotherium was a kind of elephant, but very different from the elephants we’re used to. Well, maybe you’re not used to elephants at all, but you get my point. Its tusks grew out of the lower jaw instead of the upper, and nobody’s quite sure how the animal used them.

But one thing we are sure about was that Deinotherium was big–bigger than today’s elephants, almost as big as a Baluchitherium. Unfortunately for those of us who are interested (like me), no one ever painted or carved or drew a Deinotherium from life: at least, no pictures were made in any kind of artistic medium that has survived. So we’ve got the skeletons, but that’s all: the rest can only be guesswork.

God created a lot of cool animals, many of which aren’t with us anymore. We don’t know why. Then again, He could always bring them back someday. He has the whole universe at His disposal.