You are in the mangrove swamps of North Africa, 36 million years ago.

The air in the estuary was thick, humid, and smelled of sulfur and freshwater algae. Standing knee-deep in the murky marshland of what is now Egypt, you watched a creature emerge from the reeds. It wasn’t the massive tower of muscle you knew as a modern elephant; instead, it was a sleek, pig-sized creature, barely two feet high at the shoulder, with a long, barrel-shaped body that suggested it was perfectly at home in the muck.

A Moeritherium. A distant, semi-aquatic cousin of the elephant family.

You remained perfectly still. The animal had a distinctly tapir-like face, with a flexible, elongated upper lip rather than a true trunk, which it used to forage for aquatic plants, much like a modern hippopotamus. Its brownish skin was thick and, for a fleeting moment, You saw a flash of white—a pair of elongated, tusk-like incisors protruding from its lower jaw.

The Moeritherium looked at you with small, wary eyes before grunting softly and returning to its foraging, pulling up submerged vegetation with its prehensile lip.