The neck was of moderate length, sufficiently long to enable the animal to reach the ground with the lips, a necessity in the absence of a proboscis. The body was very long and, as is shown by the length and curvature of the ribs and the great breadth of the hip-bones, extremely bulky. The limbs were very massive, and the long bones had lost the marrow-cavities, being filled with spongy bone, as in the elephants, †titanotheres and most other very heavy mammals. The bones of the fore-arm and lower leg were separate. The hip- and thigh-bones and shin-bones were remarkably elephantine in character and, if found isolated, might readily be referred to some unknown proboscidean, but the bones of the fore limb were quite different from those of the elephants. The feet likewise had a very proboscidean appearance, notwithstanding important and significant deviations in structure; they had the same shortness and massiveness and a similar reduction in the size of the hoofs, and the presence of all five digits added to the resemblance. Undoubtedly, the feet had the same columnar shape and arrangement of elastic pads. The living animal must have had an appearance quite similar to that of a rather small elephant, not exceeding six or seven feet in height at the shoulders and therefore not surpassing the largest modern rhinoceroses, the broad-lipped species of Africa (_Opsiceros simus_). Of course, the head must be excepted from the comparison, as that was totally unlike the head of any existing creature; with its long and narrow shape, its fantastic protuberances and its lack of a proboscis, it had no suggestion of likeness to any proboscidean. Whether the great body was naked, or clothed with hair, it is of course impossible to determine with confidence, but, all things considered, it seems unlikely that the hair should have been completely lost in any terrestrial mammal at so early a period. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, hairy elephants and rhinoceroses continued into and through the Pleistocene, not only in the cold regions of the north, as is shown by the hair of the American †Mastodon. In the tropics conditions were different, and in that uniformly warm climate the loss of hair by the very large mammals probably took place long before the Pleistocene. At all events, it is a significant fact that no hairless land mammals are now known in any region which has severe winters. It is true that the middle Eocene climate over most of North America was warm-temperate or subtropical, and the †uintatheres may, in consequence, have been hairless, but there is no evidence of this. [Illustration: FIG. 232.—Skull of _†Elachoceras parvum_ (lower jaw restored). Princeton University Museum.]