Platybelodon, the "Flat-Speared Tusk," certainly attracts attention with its intriguing incisors! Platybelodon stood around two meters  tall, approximately the same size as modern Asian elephants. However,  coming from the Gomphoteriidae  family, it is not a true elephant (no matter how much it looks like an awkward cousin with an underbite). Both elephants and gomphotheres tend  to have the iconic trunks and tusks  on their upper jaws; their lower jaws  are where their differences are the  most obvious. Platybelodon's lower  jaw is broad, flat, and long like a  shovel, and originally it was thought  that it used this shovel-jaw to scoop  up aquatic vegetation in swamps.  Nowadays, scientists think that the sharp, flat teeth at the end of the jaw made a good surface for scraping bark and sawing branches off of trees.  This proud proboscidean lived in the grassy Neogene savannas of  Africa and Asia, where it sought out enough vegetation to sustain its  large body. Like its modern relatives, Platybelodon likely had few predators. However, some Platy- belodon bones are preserved with  bite marks from the giant shark  Otodus megalodon! These bite marks  indicate that either their carcasses  washed out to sea and were scavenged or that they occassionally went for dangerous dips in the ocean.