Historical overview of classification and phylogeny of the Proboscidea

Abstract Extant elephants were first named Proboscidea by Illiger in 1811. At that time, they were known as ‘pachyderms’. According to Cuvier’s Le regne animal (1817), the pachyderms also included tapirs, pigs, hippos, and hyra:xes. In 1834, Blainville clustered elephants and sirenians together in the ‘gravigrades’, a mono-phyletic group which was named Tethytheria by McKenna in 1975 (which includes the orders Proboscidea, Sirenia, and Desmostylia).