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| Platybelodon ↓ | |
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| Platybelodon grangeri skeleton, Inner Mongolia Museum | |
Scientific classification 
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| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Proboscidea |
| Family: | †Amebelodontidae |
| Subfamily: | †Platybelodontinae |
| Genus: | †Platybelodon Borissiak, 1928 |
| Type species | |
| †Platybelodon danovi Borissiak, 1928 | |
| Species | |
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Platybelodon ("flat-spear tusk") is an extinct genus of large herbivorous proboscidean mammals related to modern-day elephants, placed in the "shovel tusker" family Amebelodontidae. Species lived during the middle Miocene EpochinAfrica, Asia and the Caucasus.
Platybelodon was previously believed to have fed in the swampy areas of grassy savannas, using its teeth to shovel up aquatic and semi-aquatic vegetation. However, wear patterns on the teeth suggest that it used its lower tusks to strip bark from trees, and may have used the sharp incisors that formed the edge of the "shovel" more like a modern-day scythe, grasping branches with its trunk and rubbing them against the lower teeth to cut it from a tree.[1] Adults in particular might have eaten coarser vegetation more frequently than juveniles.[2]
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Genera of the order Proboscidea
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