Elephants are the end of a 60m-year lineage – last of the megaherbivores

Four-tuskers, hoe-tuskers, shovel-tuskers are all wiped out – now only a fragment of this keystone species remainsLarge ivory seizures in Singapore make it a smuggling hub of ‘primary concern’If, just 800 generations ago, we took a summer holiday to Crete, Cyprus or Malta, we would have found familiar-looking islands, filled with the flowers and birds we can enjoy today. But bursting through the scrub would ’ve been one surprise: a pygmy elephant, one metre high, one of many different elephant species that once roamed every continent apart from Australia and Antarctica.The 20,000-year-old pygmy elephants of the Mediterranean islands may appear as fantastical as the woolly mammoths which still ambled across one Alaskan island just 5,600 years ago. But these animals ’ lives, and deaths, take on a new pertinence today. They lived a blink of an eye ago in evolutionary time and shared the planet with modern humans. And the fate of these lost elephants, warnsProf Adrian Lister, paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum, is analogous to the troubled future facing their close relatives, the African and Asian elephants threatened with obliteration today.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Environment Wildlife Archaeology Science Travel Natural History Museum Evolution Biology Global development professionals network Source Type: news