ELEPHANT EVOLUTION

African and Indian Elephants are the only proboscideans (Order Proboscidea) alive today, but there is a vast number of different species in the order that are now extinct. There are also many cases of parallel and convergent evolution. The closest living relatives of the modern-day elephant are in fact the dassie, or hyrax, and sea cows: manatees and dugongs. Sea cows and dassies are thought to have evolved from a common ancestor to the Proboscidae.
The earliest known ancestors to the elephant were herbivores that lived about 40 million years ago, and were roughly the sizes of pigs and cows. The direct ancestor to the modern-day elephant is unknown, but fossils of numerous evolutionary off-shoots, such as the moerithenes (40 million years ago), the barythenes (40 to 35 million years ago), paleomastodons (40 million years ago), gomphotheres such as the mastodon, the stegodon, and the mammoth have all been found and studied.