Log in or Sign up
gomphothere love

gomphothere

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any of several extinct proboscideans, of the family Gomphotheriidae, from North America

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun extinct elephants of Central American and South America; of the Miocene and Pleistocene

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word gomphothere.

Examples

  • It seems clear that an elephant-like animal, a mastodon or gomphothere, extinct for 12,000 years, was the intended consumer of avocados.

    A Third Ghost 2005

  • It seems clear that an elephant-like animal, a mastodon or gomphothere, extinct for 12,000 years, was the intended consumer of avocados.

    Archive 2005-11-01 2005

  • "This is the first kill site I've ever heard of in North America," said W. David Lambert, a gomphothere expert at the Louisiana School of Science, Mathematics and Arts. "That's a pretty important discovery."

    azcentral.com | news 2009

  • The gomphothere was likely hunted by the Clovis people.

    Signs of the Times 2009

Log in or sign up to add your own related words.

hypernyms (1)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. elephant

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • chained_bear commented on the word gomphothere

    "...they pointed out that proboscideans—mammoths, mastodons, and early elephant relatives called gomphotheres—flourished in the Americas until they all died out by the end of the Pleistocene."

    —Richard Stone, Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2001), 182

    September 22, 2008

  • MaryW commented on the word gomphothere

    The avocado tree (Persea americana) is known only as a cultivated species. Sometime in the thousands of years since domestication, its wild ancestor disappeared from the forests of Central America. One theory suggests that many large-fruited neo-tropical trees faded away following the loss of their seed dispersers: giant armadillos, glyptodonts, mammoths, gomphotheres, and other extinct megafauna (Janzen and Martin 1982). With its massive seed, the wild avocado would certainly have required the services of a large-bodied animal to move it around.
    Thor Hanson, The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History (New York: Basic Books, 2015), endnote accompanying ch. 1, p. 10.
    Many botanists include manzanillo on the list of plants possibly dispersed by gomphotheres or some other long-extinct megafauna.
    Id., endnote accompanying ch. 12, p. 185.

    January 30, 2016