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Paraceratherium |
The
Grande Coupure saw many new animals pouring across from Asia into Europe. Whether or not the
tapirs were among them is not immediately obvious. The
oldest tapir that we know of is a fossil discovered in Germany and dated to the early Oligocene, not long after the Coupure. Named
Protapirus, we know that it, or its very close relatives were found not only in Asia, but also North America, by the second half of the epoch and managed to survive, with relatively little change, into the Early Miocene that followed, dying out about 20 million years ago.
At first glance, since the oldest fossil is German, it appears that tapirs originated in Europe and then spread east, and it's purely a coincidence that they happened to do so after the Coupure - which, after all, was a time of climatic change. The problem is, there wasn't anything remotely tapir-like living in Europe before the Coupure, but there were plenty of potential ancestors elsewhere. So it's perhaps more likely that the first true tapirs were Asian, and we simply haven't found their fossils yet. Even so, we can at least say that Protapirus, and its later relative Paratapirus (which never seems to have left Europe) really were tapirs, rather than some close relative. A key feature here is that, unlike their earlier relatives, they already had the modifications to the nasal bones that suggest the presence of the short trunk that modern tapirs have, although it was probably less prominent than in current species.