P. namadicus has been suggested to be the largest known land mammal by some authors based on extrapolation from fragmentary remains, though these estimates are highly speculative.

While these remains were originally declared by the Collegium Medicum in the nearby city of Gotha to be purely mineral in nature, Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, a polymath in the employ of the ducal court of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, correctly recognised that they represented the remains of an elephant.

[5] In 1924, Matsumoto Hikoshichirō coined Palaeoloxodon, and circumscribed it as a subgenus of Loxodonta (which include the living species of African elephants).

Vincent J. Maglio in a 1973 publication controversially synonymised Palaeoloxodon with Elephas based on morphological similarities between the two genera.

[3]During the 19th and 20th centuries, species of Palaeoloxodon were subject to numerous phylogenetic hypotheses regarding their relationship to other elephantids.

[9] A later study published in 2018 by the same authors based on the complete nuclear genome revised these results, and suggested P. antiquus resulted from reticulate evolution and had a complex hybridization history, with the majority (~60%) of its nuclear genome coming from a lineage more closely related to modern African elephants than to Asian elephants and mammoths, but which diverged before the split between the two living species, with significant introgressed ancestry from African forest elephants (~36%) and to a lesser extent mammoths (~6%).

[10] Analysis of mitochondrial genomes, including Palaeoloxodon individuals from Northern China indicates Palaeoloxodon individuals harboured multiple separate mitochondrial genome lineages derived from African forest elephants, some being more closely related to some West African forest elephant groups than to others.

[6] The skull is proportionally short and tall,[3] with the premaxillary bones containing the tusks being flared outwards.

[3] These tusks could reach 4 metres (13 ft) in length, and probably over 190 kilograms (420 lb) in weight in the largest species, larger than any recorded in modern elephants.

[15] The molar teeth of Palaeoloxodon species typically show a "dot-dash-dot" wear pattern,[16] with the enamel folds concentrated into a major central structure at the midline of the tooth, which are flanked by smaller folds on either side, and the crowns of the tooth are generally proportionally narrow.

A population of P. recki migrated out of Africa at the beginning of the Middle Pleistocene around 800,000 years ago, diversifying into the radiation of Eurasian Palaeoloxodon species, including P. antiquus, and P. namadicus.

[28] P. antiquus was able to disperse onto many islands in the Mediterranean, undergoing insular dwarfism and speciating into numerous distinct varieties of dwarf elephants.

[31] The timing of extinction of Chinese Palaeoloxodon and Indian P. namadicus is uncertain, but claims of a Holocene survival are not substantiated for either region.

[36] The dwarf elephant P. tiliensis from the Greek island of Tilos is suggested by some authors to have survived as recently as 3,500 years Before Present (around 1500 BC) based on preliminary radiocarbon dating done in the 1970s, which would make it the youngest surviving elephant in Europe, but this has not been thoroughly investigated.

[37] There is extensive evidence for butchery and to a lesser extent hunting of the European straight-tusked elephant by archaic humans like Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals.

[39] Based on the association of their remains with stone artefacts, it has been suggested modern humans encountered and butchered the Japanese P. naumanni and the Cyprus dwarf elephant P. cypriotes during the Last Glacial Period.