Deinotheriidae - Relationships

Relationships

The ancestry and evolutionary relationships of the deinotheres remain obscure. It has been suggested that they are related to the barytheres, due to similarities in the structure of the teeth. What is clear is that they diverged from the rest of the proboscideans at a very early date. In the 1970s several researchers placed them in a separate order to the Proboscidea, but this view is not followed nowadays.