Are there dwarf elephants

Create a list of articles to read later. You will be able to access your list from any article in Discover. Over the past few hundreds of thousands of years Sicily was home to two different miniature elephants. Now for the first-time researchers have been able to extract and delve into the DNA of one of these extinct elephants, helping to show how the largest land mammal ever to exist shrank by at least 8,kg to become one of the smallest elephants known.

The tiny elephants that were once found on Sicily were some of the smallest elephants ever to have existed, but quite extraordinarily they are descended from one of the biggest land mammals ever to have lived: the straight-tusked elephant. These animals were genuine giants, with some individuals reaching up to 4. An adult straight-tusked elephant could very easily have rested its chin on the back of a bull African savannah elephant. But new research is revealing that it took a surprisingly short period of time for this miniaturisation to occur, perhaps just 40 generations for the huge ancestors to shrink to the tiny islanders.

The change in size over this time would have been the equivalent of an adult human shrinking to the size of a rhesus macaque monkey. Dr Victoria Herridge is a researcher at the Museum whose focus is on the tiny elephants once found on a number of the islands in the Mediterranean, and was involved in the paper published in Current Biology. We've only had ancient DNA from German specimens. This is largely due to the environments in which the fossils were preserved, with the heat and humidity making it exceedingly difficult for any DNA to survive.

The team were able to extract and sequence DNA from the petrous bone, a small and very dense bone found in the base of the skull, and one that is renowned for preserving ancient DNA. The results have shown that the straight-tusked elephant lineage that led to the tiny elephants on Sicily actually split away from the German elephants around , years ago, even though these miniature elephants are only thought to have been isolated on Sicily within the last , years.

This is intriguing because it suggests that in the gap between these dates, there was something interesting going on with the populations of these giant herbivores within continental Europe, perhaps a divide between those living in the north and those in the south. The island of Sicily sits in the Mediterranean Sea just off the toe of Italy.

While today the wildlife that lives on the island is much like that of the mainland, in the past it used to be home to a range of miniature animals. One of these was truly tiny, reaching just a metre in height and likely weighing around kg, they were about the same size as a Shetland pony. Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer.

In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. The skeleton of a dwarf elephant found on the island of Sicily, where the creatures underwent a remarkably rapid reduction in size. Ancient elephants that colonized the island of Sicily no earlier than , years ago shrank drastically in size generation by generation, probably owing to food scarcity.

Download references. Article 27 OCT Straight-tusked elephants may have migrated to Sicily between 70, and , years ago, the team explains in a statement.

During that time, sea levels were low, and land bridges may have made it possible for the elephants to populate the islands. If a land bridge didn't exist, the elephants may have swam over to Sicily, the New York Times reports.

The dwarf elephant lost about pounds and four centimeters per generation on average before finally shrinking down to a height of 6 feet tall and weight of 1. Scientists suggest the dwarf elephants reached this size in a short amount of time due to scarcity of resources, per Gizmodo. As the descendants of giants, the extinct dwarf elephants are among the most intriguing examples of evolution on islands," Axel Barlow, a paleogenomics expert at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom, says in a statement.

The team hopes other scientists can use their DNA extraction technique to study fossils from similarly warm regions, such as Africa and southern Europe, where the climate may degrade the genetic material, reports the New York Times. Currently, the Sicilan miniature elephant fossils are on display at the Gemmellaro Geological Museum in Palermo, Italy.