If at high school biology you were taught that there are two species of elephants — the African and the Asian —it’s time to forget that.
A new research shows that the “African elephant” is actually two species. These two species are as evolutionarily different as goat and sheep are from one another. It’s a surprising degree of divergence that has just been reported.
The study, published in this week’s issue of the journal PLoS Biology was conducted by teams from Harvard, the University of Illinois and the University of York in Britain. The evolutionary divergence was identified by analyzing the DNA of the living elephant species and two of their extinct evolutionary cousins, the woolly mammoth and mastodon.
The study suggests the species separated several million years ago, about the same time that humans diverged from chimps.
The forest elephant is smaller, and is sometimes referred to as the “dwarf African elephant,” standing at about 8.2 feet high compared with the savanna elephant’s 11.5 feet, and weighing about half as much. The forest elephant also has straighter tusks and oval-shaped ears.
The savanna elephant weighs between 6 and 7 tons, roughly double the weight of the forest elephant.
The African elephant is listed as endangered by the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and splitting the population into two different species places the forest elephant in much more dreadful category.
