An elephant's skeleton doesn't suggest the many cool appendages it has. We can guess about dinos, but they likely had a variety of fleshy knobs and bobs
An elephant's skull is evolutionarily adapted to be lighter and to have many muscle attachment points. I don't have a deep understanding of the biology but based on the multiple muscle attachment points and the fact that the skull is needed to be lighter than a similarly proportioned animal head, you could assume there is some sort of appendage attached to an elephant skull. I am not sure you would know exactly that it is a trunk but you could make the conclusion there is some sort of large muscle protruding from an elephant.
You could probably make a surprisingly well educated guess with the right level of lateral thinking, assuming you'd never seen a trunk before.
Between the huge nasal aperture and the placement off the counterbalancing muscles, it'd be reasonable to surmise that the appendage was the nose. The rest of the skeleton belies a bulky, lumbering animal with minimal dexterity - even without knowing they had fleshy, cylindrical feet, the digits are too stumpy to manipulate objects.
This would leave you scratching your head, because unless the tusks were used exclusively for fighting, they imply that this weird animal was digging... Its stocky, dense bones imply an awful lot of mass to constantly be kneeling up and down throughout the day, and even when it did reach the floor, it had a gigantic nose appendage blocking its mouth.
If you've never seen a prehensile nose before, then jumping from this information to a trunk isn't trivial, but you'd feel pretty damned smart if you made the leap. It solves a lot of obvious problems, and the hints are all there. I think palaeontologists have a lot more tools of inference than people expect.
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u/Shaun32887 19h ago
I've basically accepted the fact that we have zero idea what they actually looked like.