Mammoth construction of the Great Pyramid of ancient Egypt. The earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes. The family Elephantidae is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes the living elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved. The following cladogram shows the placement
The Reckoning (Long novel) The Reckoning (Long novel) The Reckoning is a 2004 thriller/suspense/horror novel by Jeff Long. Molly is a freelance photographer and journalist who has just been offered an assignment by "The New York Times": travel to Cambodia to cover a U.S. military search for the body of an American pilot who went down thirty years ago during the Vietnam War. She meets up with the search team and encounters two civilians. One is Duncan O'Brian, a kindly academic and archaeologist who is interested in restoring ancient Khmer temples. The other is John Kleat, the brother of an MIA Vietnam veteran who