Chilgatherium ('Chilga beast' after the locality in which it was found) is the earliest and most primitive representative of the family Deinotheriidae. It is known from late Oligocene (27- to 28-million-year-old) fossil teeth found in the Ethiopian district of Chilga.
Chilgatherium ('Chilga beast' after the locality in which it was found) is the earliest and most primitive representative of the family Deinotheriidae. It is known from late Oligocene (27- to 28-million-year-old) fossil teeth found in the Ethiopian district of Chilga.
So far, only a few molar teeth have been found, but these are distinct enough that this animal can be identified with confidence. The teeth differ from those of Prodeinotherium, Deinotherium, and the various barytheres in various details, enough to show that this is a distinct type of animal, and has been placed in its own subfamily. Compared to later deinotheres, Chilgatherium was quite small, about tall at the shoulder and weighed about . It is not known if it shared the distinctive downward-curving tusks on the lower jaw that the later deinotheres had.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).