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Narrator
The deep origins of elephants lie in the Turkana Basin in Northern Kenya. In a place called Buluk, scientists are finding fossils that point to a magnificent age of elephants. They reveal the ancient history of the mammals with trunks called Proboscideans. This is from the right side of the jaw. It certainly is... -
Paleontologist Voiceover
Fossils are the messengers of the past, I believe that. I think that we, as paleontologists, are trying to be the interpreters of the messengers from the past. They give you the opportunity to see the kind of incredible journey that elephants had to make to become elephants. It took 60 million years to make an elephant. (exciting music) I'm Bill Sanders, I'm a paleontologist at the University of Michigan. I specialize on studying the evolution of Proboscideans, including elephants. -
Narrator
Today, Buluk is one of the hottest, driest places on Earth, but 17 million years ago, it was a lush forest with rivers and wetlands. It's a very wet climate, it's a very equable climate, very warm climate. It's a great place to be a browser. It's a great place to go out and look for vegetation. Great place to go get a salad, Africa in the early Miocene. -
Narrator
How can scientists reconstruct those vanished environments? It turns out, ancient landscapes leave traces, just like ancient animals do. We often find fossil wood and fossil seeds, so that's telling us something about the environment, and the red sediments around us are ancient soils that are actually ancient floodplain deposits, so the animals would've been living out on these floodplains in these forested areas. I'm Ellen Miller, I'm a paleontologist associated with the Turkana Basin Institute. We're trying to reconstruct the whole environment that these animals were living in. If you go in and just pick up the bones, it's like taking the chocolate chips out of the cookie, so we work with geologists and climate scientists and isotope specialists and all kinds of people, geochemists. -
Narrator
The painstaking work of Ellen and her colleagues is allowing them to reconstruct the whole, vanished world of ancient Buluk. If you were to be transported back to the early Miocene of Buluk, 17 million years ago, it would've been a mature, meandering river system and a woodlands, and there would've been a whole host of different kinds of elephants. You would've had the Deinotheres. They're very, very primitive. They're about 1/3 or 1/2 the size of a modern elephant, and they would've been kind of snuffling along the river banks, because they seem to really like a closed-canopy forest and a wet environment. At the same time, you have the Amebelodons, the shovel-tuskers. The lower incisors are these big, long, shovel-like tusks, so they would've used them to scoop up their dinner. -
Narrator
As scientists excavate, they are astonished by the diversity of strange beasts they are discovering. (adventurous music) (animals growling) Ancient Buluk was a sort of Jurassic Park of elephants. Imagine I'm taking you on a safari, but a safari back in time. You'll be confronted with these magical creatures, a slice of Africa that is now gone. You'd be confronted here with amazing herds of elephants. (exciting music) You have a herd of Deinotheres, you have a herd of these elephant ancestors called the Gomphotheres. It'd be mind-blowing to confront this scene. (animals growling) I think the Miocene, 16 million years ago, at Buluk, that would have been the center of the empire of the age of the elephants.
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