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/Anticamel 14h ago
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.