Crowdsourced TetZooCon 2015 report

TetZooCon 2015 back in November was a great success and a lot of fun, I only regret I wasn't able to stay 'till the end. Naturally, Pygmy Elephants was on sale throughout the day at a discount. (Extra links will be added to this post shortly.)

The venue was the London Wetlands Centre in Barnes, which must have London's most spectacular view from a Gent's toilet's window, even on a very rainy day like the day of TetZooCon.

First on was TetZoo instigator Darren Naish, on "The Evolution of Sea Monsters", and some of ridiculous lengths cryptozoologists have gone to in order to try to fit a vast range of one-off sightings into known zoology, often including hypothetical loosely species based on the fossil record but given a bizarre (and evidence-free) evolutionary spin in an attempt to accommodate them (clumsily) into known zoology.

I particularly liked Naish's "cryptozoological pyramid of inferences":

I was on next, speaking on, you guessed it, pygmy elephants. I'll leave the audience - both in the room and monitoring it via Twitter - to summarise my talk.

This included Loxodonta pumilio, an alleged pygmy elephant species, a specimen of which was once on show at Bronx Zoo. Although when he died and his remains went the American Museum of Natural History in New York a century ago, they were pretty convinced he was a bog-standard juvenile forest elephant.

"Congo", as Bronx Zoo's "pygmy elephant" specimen was known, is regarded as the best evidence for a pygmy elephant in uncritical internet regurgitation circles, but few realise that he was an infant at the time. The talk was an opportunity to show some rarely seen "before" and "after" photos that make "Congo" seem less like a pygmy after all...

It's always interesting to see what engages the punters most, and at TetZooCon it seemed to be:

World Wildlife Fund Malaysia accidentally upgrading its Borneo (Asian) elephants to "pygmy elephents" in a press release (more on this here.):

(Paleo-artist Jon Conway is co-instigator of TetZooCon.)

The discussion of how much smaller Borneo elephants are than mainland Asian elephants prompted a virtual exchange with Dr Victoria Herridge, the Natural History Museum's discoverer of Mammathus creticus (and more recently another Mediterranean pygmy elephant), as well as the presenter of Mammoth Autopsy. It ended with a virtual wave to me from Tori.

The revelation that miniature, fist-sized "pygmy elephant" talismans change hands in Thailand and Burma for a lot of money, and their extraordinary source, caused a lot of excitement:

As did the assertion, put about by British big game hunter WR Foran and others, that perfidious French ivory hunters invented the whole "pygmy elephant" thing as a scam to circumvent regulations banning the shooting of juvenile elephants, by claiming that they'd just shot adult (made-up) pygmies instead:

Punters also found the idea of fossil Mediterranean pygmy elephants having litters particularly cool. In answer to a question, I explained that the Spignallo Cave site in Sicily yielded lots of pygmy elephant skeletons, of which many were juveniles or infants. This suggests a high level of infant mortality, and the bit about pygmy elephants having litters of several young was speculation based on this. (Modern African elephants have only one calf at a time, with a gestation period of almost two years. There's a life reconstruction of a juvenile Elephas falconeri here and a "fossil pygmy elephant identification chart" here.)

One of the audience identified with the Sicilian fossil pygmy elephant Elephas falconeri (aka Paleoloxodon falconeri) in particular, as he was from Sicily too (or at least from Italy). (Although his photo actually shows the pygmy stegodon Stegadon floriensis on the left, from Indonesia. Elephas falconeri is here.)

There was also Twitter chatter about "hoaxes involving young", particularly those perpetrated by circus manager PT Barnum, and Ringling Bros Barnum and Bailey's Circus, who had several dodgy pygmy elephants in their menagerie:

The bit about forest elephant females, from their late teens upwards, adopting the orphaned infants who had lost their mothers to poachers after they had weaned also provoked responses. This is in the Dzanga Clearing study of forest elephant behaviour, carried out by the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Central African Republic, which lasted well over a decade. Orphan savannah elephant infants, by contrast, invariably don't survive. (It's thought that a 1982 photo from Congo Brazzaville of a herd of small elephants, with young, is in fact a herd of infants orphaned by poaching and adopted by teenage females. You'll have to read Pygmy Elephants for more information, it includes a reproduction of the 1982 photos of the Congo-Brazzaville alleged pygmy elephant herd.)

There followed Jessica Lawrence-Wujek's talk on why Ichthyosaurs are the coolest reptiles of the Mesozoic. The more you study Ichthyosaurs, the more bizarre they get, particularly their paddles. These started life as the fingers of a limb, but these seem to have sprouted more and more bits out of the sides of what used to be digits as they evolved. They were creatures of the "shallow seas" - seas of around 100 feet deep at the most, but their big eyes suggest they may have been diving further into the dark depths of the Mesozoic waters.

Urban birder David Lindo described how his "Great British Bird" competition elected the robin as Britain's favourite bird - appropriate, as robins behave differently in the UK than on the European mainland. On the Continent, they're forest birds that follow deer or bison, waiting for the to churn up the bugs they feed on. Only in Britain are they garden birds that look to human gardeners to turn up bugs for them. He described the awkward silence in a North American bird hide when he shouted excitedly about seeing a particular type of rare tit. "We call it a titmouse or a chicadee", a North American birder eventually told him.

Vicky Coules recounted The Future is Wild, an After Man-style animated series about the animals that inherit the Earth after we leave (in spaceships to go to a nicer planet, apparently, at the behest of the American network funding it.) Elephantine megasquid colonise the land looking very much like HP Lovecraft's Cthulu. An elephant seal-like giant flightless gannet colonised the frozen regions. Mammals are consigned to history, the last one being a hamster-like "pog" kept as food by seed-gathering spiders. The future Earth includes an Antarctic rain forest, which reminded me of the "Strontium Dog" story from 1980s 2000AD sci-fi comic in which mutant bounty hunters land in an Antarctic rainforest (the result of human-made climate change) and encounter fauna including "monkey-gators".

There then followed the paleoart session on which Naish, Conway and Mark Witton (they all know their pterosaurs!) led us in an illuminating life reconstruction exercise. We were given deliberately badly done cast of one of the Solnhofen pterodactyl casts (one of the people on my table had actually been to Solnhofen) and asked to draw it as a bird, a bat, a reptile or whatever the features suggested. My hopping moorhen with teeth that couldn't fold its wings fully and that had vestiges of fingers used as sort of whiskers to detect wind direction didn't make the top five. Then I had to dash off on Mystery Animals of Suffolk business, I very much regret.

Both Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs and the Scientific American TetZoo blog have excellent reports on TetZooCon 2015.

EATS 150 BANANAS A DAY does this pygmy elephant...

"EATS 150 BANANAS A DAY does this pygmy elephant whose home is London Zoo. His midgeship is less than three feet high" and said the be the first specimen at London Zoo. "It is not a baby elephant" and comes from "French Gaboon" and eats "nothing but bananas". That's according to the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, November 1 1922 (above). It gives as a source "Wide World", which appears to be Wide World magazine.

In the book Pygmy Elephants I relate how the The Wellington, New Zealand Evening Post of 27 January 1923 quotes "L.G.M" in the London Daily Mail as saying there was a three-foot (1.5m) baby "pygmy elephant" deposited in London Zoo by a Miss Cunningham, who obtained him from "French Gaboon" (Gabon).
The article claims, "for the first time on record, a baby pygmy elephant has just reached the UK, and that it eats bananas, of which it needed 150 a day. (Exactly the same headline as in the Plain Dealer. The little elephant broke his leg when captured and this had set "rather badly".

In the Evening Post article, there was - for a change - some indication of how big the 150-bananas-a-day "pygmy elephant" was eventually expected to be. Both his mother and father were, reportedly, shot when the little one was captured. His father was "only six feet high (1.8m) and his mother was six inches shorter still" (making her 5ft 6 inches, 1.67m). This assumes the male and female elephant observed around the unnamed "pygmy" when he was captured were his parents. As extensively described in Pygmy Elephants, forest elephant society is a bit more complicated. The other elephants shot on the occasion of his capture could just have easily been his older siblings, and the female could have been his teenage stepmother.

As for the age of 150-Bananas-A-Day Boy himself, it was given as three years old, probably based more on the time elapsed since his capture than anything else. Assuming it's correct, three feet is well within the expected range of a conventionally-sized forest elephant of that age.

It's possible that the mention of the elephant calf's broken leg could be a garbled reference to the male "pygmy elephant" known as "Congo", whose leg was broken on capture but healed, but later got infected? Or could it have been the female "pygmy elephant" Tiny, whose gender had been garbled, on her way to the Bronx via London?

Thanks to Richard Muirhead for finding this article.

White-skinned, super-aggressive scimitar-tusked pygmy elephants from the "zone of mystery"

While I was at this year's recent Weird Weekend, Richard Muirhead gave me a photocopied chapter of a book he'd discovered completely by chance, his hairdresser had it on display in an ornamental bookshelf in their salon in Macclesfield.

The book was Great Mother Forest by Attilio Gatti, published by Hodder and Stroughton, London (no publication date given, but it seems from the text to have been some time around 1937.)




The book describes the four-feet high (1.21 metres) white-coloured, super-aggressive pygmy elephants of the Kibali-Ituri forest, the "zone of mystery" in the Belgian Congo. (Gatti was Belgian, Richard told me, despite having a very Italian-sounding name. Italian immigrants settled in large numbers in the industrial heartlands of Belgium in the late nineteenth century, there are still identifiably Italian communities in Belgium.)

According to Gatti, an aggressive herd of these pale pygmy elephants, looking for a fight, had attacked the Belgian colonial District Commissioner Hackers in the forest, forcing him to hide up a tree for many hours. These elephants had very dense, sharp-pointed tusks, with a reddish tinge to them, some of the tusks Gatti had been shown by the "natives" had streaks of dark red or even purple in them.

Great Mother Forest also described how "some months ago" and official in Lubero (somewhere else in the same region of the Belgian Congo) argued over the price of a permit to hunt and kill "one elephant" with a local chief who presented four tusks from the same elephant. (This appears to have been a conventional-sized elephant, not a pygmy.) Gatti said the skull with the four tusks ended up in a museum, possibly the Terveuren Museum near Brussels. (This could be this specimen , and it's a similar story to the one described by Armand Denis in On Safari: The Story of My Life, (see Pygmy Elephants, page 12.)

Gatti's super-aggressive pygmy elephant has many characteristics in common with the forest elephant – a supposedly more aggressive temperament and denser, thinner, pinkish-grey tinted tusks being a characteristic of the forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis. It would be tempting to put this down to a simple misidentification of the local forest elephants (L. cyclotis).

But there are some problems with that assessment. Firstly, forest elephants had become by the mid-1930s quite well-known among zoologists. Secondly, Gatti mentions three types of elephants known to the local Mambuti and Bandande "pygmy" tribes (ethnic groups of smaller than average forest-dwelling peoples) – savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana), M'zei, the feisty, four-footer pointy-tusked pygmy elephants, Somà, another variety bigger than M'zei but at around nine feet at the shoulder smaller than the savannah elephants, and about the correct height for a forest elephant.

In Gatti's opinion, the Somà elephant is of the sub-species Loxodonta knochenhaueri, a now discredited sub-species of elephant that's since disappeared from zoology catalogues. The now defunct elephant sub-species L.africana knochenhaueri, which described the type of savannah elephant normally encountered in Tanzania, was an invention of German zoologist Paul Matschie at the turn of the twentieth century, when he whittled down the 22 then prevailing sub-species of African elephant to just four. By the 1940s, L.africana knochenhaueri had gone from the zoological literature, replaced by just two types of known African elephant – L. africana and L. cyclotis.

The pygmy M'zei elephants were, according to Gatti, the male of the (sub-)species, while the noticeably smaller females were known as Malekwe. They were said to live in small herds, between 10 and 12 individuals. The Mambuti and Bandande peoples were very reluctant to enter the deep forest's "zone of mystery", so terrified were they at the prospect of the extraordinarily fierce M'zei pygmy elephants not only goring them with their scimitar-like tusks, but also repeatedly stomping on them in a very vindictive manner.

The reluctance of the Bandande and Mambuti guides notwithstanding, Gatti claimed he was actually able to see the M'zei for himself in Tchibinda Forest, from a distance - a group of these were "at play" by a river.

The M'zei, were, according to Gatti, not recognised by the Belgian colonial authorities. As colonial officialdom didn't accept that some of the small tusks the "natives" tried to sell them were from adult pygmy elephants, they assumed these were instead merely the tusks of juvenile elephants – illegal for sale under Belgian colonial regulations. So the natives were forced to hide these "too small" tusks, selling them clandestinely to the "ivory workers" that occasionally came round, for a knockdown price. A possibly last-minute footnote by Gatti adds that the "most recent decree" of April 1935 "mentions" pygmy elephants for the first time.

This decree by the Belgian administration "mentioning" pygmy elephants would be consistent with the conservation laws of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo. This law, possibly inherited from Belgium, decrees that the éléphant pygmée (pygmy elephant) shall enjoy the same complete protection as other types of elephant. See Pygmy Elephants pages 115-166 for pygmy elephant references in the current conservation laws of the Congo Basin states.

Locating pygmy elephants in the "Kabali-Ituri" forest is interesting. As described in Pygmy Elephants (page 184), there was a lot of traffic on bulletin boards used by conservation people a couple of years back about the forest elephants of what's now known as the Iture-Uélé being some sort of unique eco-type. These Iture-Uélé elephants were said to be particularly hard to photograph in their habitat, and if you saw them at all in their deep forest environment, it was as a "dark shadow moving."

Also described in Great Mother Forest is "Lord Rothschild" (Baron Walter Rothschild) showing Gatti a variety of elephant tusks in his museum at Tring (then the Zoology Museum, shortly thereafter to become an annex of the British Museum, Natural History) with Rothschild demonstrating to Gatti how the tusks of "pygmy elephants" differed from those of other elephants.

Rothschild was a believer in pygmy elephants it seemed, and was apparently able to tell the age and gender of an elephant from its tusks with great certainty – which much more certainty than we are able to do today, it seems. We know have the technology to tell where in Africa elephants came from, based on their isotopes, but gauging the age and gender of an elephant from its tusks remains an inexact science, so I have to say I'm a little dubious of Rothschild's confident assessments.

Gatti led ten expeditions to Africa up to 1945, and was one of the first Europeans to see an okapi. There's a very short biography of Gatti here and a photo of him here.

I also got an update from Lars Thomas, regarding the Camerooni "pygmy elephant" specimens rediscovered in the University of Copenhagen's museum. (See Pygmy Elephants pages 151-155.)

I'm afraid the news is not good. Lars thinks his team now know where the missing skin of one of the elephants is (it was stored somewhere "off-site" and was unaccounted for), and a DNA test on the skin would be much easier and less destructive than DNA testing the tusks, skull or teeth. But there have been cutbacks at the University, and the prospect of there being resources available to DNA test any of their Camerooni "pygmy elephants" is becoming more remote.

Report on a couple of Pygmy Elephants book launch events, and a vaguely related new project

The London launch for Pygmy Elephants on 13 March at the Big Green Bookshop was a big success, with thirty people dropping in during the course of the evening, and yes, I did shift some copies. Everyone who bought a copy got a little drawing of an Elephas falconeri skeleton from me on the title page, after I was desperately practising these at work earlier that day.

A proper palaeontologist turned up – Dr Darren Naish, of Scientific American's popular Tet Zo blog all the way from the University of Southampton, was in da house, with one of the London-based "@TetZoo possee", John Conway, paleoartist. I've since got wind of a Tet Zoo Con event upcoming. See here for the background to the Poundland komodo dragon model I ended up giving him on the night.

Also putting in an appearance was Oliver Simmonds, who I knew as Olly Simmonds at school back in the early 1980s, and who told me he has a new book on the way, after an absence of his name from bookshop shelves of a couple of decades – he wrote Delirium just after leaving university. And Rosanne Rabinowitz, author of Helen's Story - she's a character out of occultist Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan. Most of the NUJ London Freelance Branch committee were in evidence, and events were considerably enlivened shortly after-kick off by one of our number accidentally breaking a bottle of white wine. It turned out the Big Green's assistant behind the counter that night is in LFB too.

A former colleague from my English language teaching days back in the early Noughties attended, and Rosie from London Cryptzoology Club. There were even a couple of old enemies who seemed to be getting on well. We had apologies from Prof. Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum's Palentology Dept, who has a regular adult education gig in Finchley on Thursdays.

Darren had heard the legend about Jumbo the elephant laying down his life to save the Tom Thumb elephant from that oncoming freight train at that marshalling yard on St John's Ontario in September 1885 – and I was able to confirm that it was just a that, a legend – possibly the sort of tall tale PT Barnum liked to make up for publicity purposes. Darren was also able to clear up the possible confusion between gaur (Indian bison) and water buffalo. I showed a slide of a herd of wild cattle thundering past in Neyyar Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary, reputed habitat of the kallana pygmy elephant of Kerala. Tracker Mallan Kani said they were gaur, but Mr
A. Marriott Hyde in a letter to Fortean Times cast doubt on Mallan's identification saying my photo showed water buffalo. Nope, said tetrapod zoologist Darren, they were most definitely gaur.



Definitely gaur, not water buffalo, apparently. Photo: copyright Matt Salusbury

The book reading at Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel on Saturday 5 April was an altogether more surreal affair. None of my so-called friends who said they were coming turned up in the end, including some people who promised to come to the March Big Green event and didn't come to that either!

In the event, I ended up reading aloud extracts of Pygmy Elephants to a small audience mostly of Green and Black Cross legal support people (there were at Freedom there giving back-office phone support for arrestees at a Occupy anniversary demo in Trafalgar Square that day. In the event the plan to "Occupy Trafalgar Square" unsurprisingly didn't get off the ground, so they didn't have much to do.) One of their number was a trainee lawyer up from Liverpool, where she worked with one of the Hillsborough support groups.

One of the trainee lawyers said she laughed so much she was crying, but this was nothing to do with Pygmy Elephants, which wasn't written to be funny, but down to the hand signals that Freedom's manager "Legal Andy" was making behind my back while I was reading. His hand movements mostly involved miming the actions of the elephant I was describing, by sticking his forearm up against his nose and waving it in the air as if were a trunk.

We had one of the most impressive apologies I've heard for not attending, from Dr Victoria Herridge of the Natural History Museum, who had suddenly got a gig hunting for mammoth bones in Siberia, and who therefore at short notice had to be out of town. Prof Adrian Lister's apology due to an imminent journey abroad may well have been the same gig.

There will be a "Devon launch" of Pygmy Elephants sometime during the weekend of 15 and 16 August at Weird Weekend. I am one of the speakers, giving a talk on a subject I stumbled across while writing Pygmy Elephants – a bizarrely straight tusk of a mystery animal found in the ivory markets of Addis Ababa by Baron Maurice de Rothschild and his team during his East African expedition in 1907. While most cryptozoology today attracts zero funding and is the preserve of the perpetually skint, this was an example of very well-resourced cryptozoology where money was no object. (Maurice seems to have lost interest after his one East African expedition, in his twenties, and gone into horseracing and art collecting instead.)

His associate Henri Neuville wrote it up a fifty-page study of the "enigmatic tooth" (they weren't even sure if it was a tusk) a few years later.



Front cover for the purposes of a review or critique (Copyright Act 1988)

Neuville concluded that the grain of the tusk under a microscope didn't look like that of the tusk of any known animal that had tusks, it wasn't fossilized, nor did it look like any of the "anomalous" deformed tusks of elephants or hippoes that had been collected by museums over the years. You'll have to go to the talk for more.

Gimpy the pygmy elephant at Cincinnati Zoo

(Front cover image for the purposes of a critique or review, Copyright Act 1988)

There appears to have been a pygmy elephant, or an elephant described as such, at Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens in the 1930s. (Cincinnati, Ohio, in the US.) Their name (gender not given in the extracts I saw) was "Gimpy" and there are three references to "Gimpy the pygmy elephant" in the book The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens by Joy W. Kraft (20101), part of the Images of America series. I am investigating further.

Meanwhile, a quick round-up of the pygmy elephants in zoos described in Pygmy Elephants. Bernard Heuvelmans mentions that pygmy elephants were said to live in Antwerp Zoo, although I haven't found any references to this in the online catalogue of Antwerp's Felix Archive, which now has the digitised catalogue of the Antwerp Zoo papers. Bronx Zoo had "Congo the elephant", the type specimen of the alleged pygmy elephant species Loxodonta pumilio, whose remains are now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, clearly labelled as that of a forest elephant (Specimen No. M-35591 in the Museum's accession log.) There was at least one other "pygmy elephant" at Bronx Zoo, a female known as "Tiny", who may or may not have been the same animal as the pygmy elephant "Josephine".

In 1923, according to the Wellington, New Zealand, Evening Post (quoting the London Daily Mail), there was said to be a young pygmy elephant being looked after on behalf of a private owner in London Zoo. But then you should't ever believe anything you read in the Daily Mail. And you'll have to read Pygmy Elephants for more information on the two "pygmy elephants" said by a German vet to be living in Tacoma Zoo, the private zoo of the President of Liberia, in the 1970s.

Front and back cover!

This is the final front and back cover of Pygmy Elephants - its publication is imminent. Its publication date will be known very soon, with details of where to buy it. Watch this space!

Fossil pygmy elephant identification chart

I've just finished one of the two "Pygmy Elephant Identification Charts" that will go in the back of the Pygmy Elephants book. This is the chart of fossil pygmy elephants, stegodons and mammoths, before the captions were added. You'll have to buy the book to see it full-sized and annotated. With thanks to Russell Hawley and to Georgios Lyras, who gave me permission to reproduce the images of pygmy mammoths at the top left and centre of the top row respectively.

Capture of alleged "kallana" pygmy elephant

An animal described as a "calf elephant, which is purportedly a 'pygmy'" was "tethered" (captured) in February by Kerala Forest Department (KFD) vets in the forest in Paruthypally, in the Trivandrum District of the South Indian state of Kerala.

The capture was covered in The Hindu newspaper of Feb 7 this year and there's also a Malayalam language TV broadcast, which has a fleeting few seconds of a slightly strange-looking elephant moving in the forest, with not much to indicate the scale.

While the traditions of the local Kani "tribals" who live in the Peppara forest describe "kallana" - an agile pygmy elephant five feet in height or less, the Kerala wildlife officials were so convinced that the elephant was nothing of the sort that they "dismissed" a demand for DNA samples to be taken from the elephant. V. Gopinath, Chief Wildlife Warden, Kerala, was quoted as saying "kallana" said "kallana" was "a myth" that "existed in the folklore of tribespeople alone." Another KFD official described the elephant as being a six-year-old calf.

The TV broadcast has a short interview with local wildlife photographer Sali Palode, and shows photos by Sali of his 2005 and 2010 sightings of kallana, including the corpse of an alleged female kallana that he found by a lake in 2005. (This appears in my forthcoming Pygmy Elephants book. The licence I bought for reproduction of his photo doesn't extend to web, but there's a watermarked version of this photo on Sali's website. The Malayalam TV report also has photos by Benny Ajantha and Jain Angadi, who were with Sali when he made his 2010 "kallana" sighting.

There's also a photo by Sali of a strange-looking elephant head-on in The Hindu's report. It's more convincing than any of the other kallana photos I've seen. The Hindu article is sceptical - more so than previously - and uses the word "pygmy" in quotation marks throughout. The article points out that the calf elephant was in a bad way - it "had developed infections" and may have been abandoned by the herd.

When I interviewed Sali in 2011, his agent Balan Madhavan (who acted as interpreter) was emphasising the need for Sali to collect evidence of "kallana" for DNA analysis - dung, hairs and discarded skin from the soles of the feet are the most common bits you find - and the "demand" for DNA samples to be taken from the captured elephant calf at Paruthypally came from Sali. The report adds that "blood samples of the animal have also been collected, which could be used for settling the controversy."

I haven't been able to find out what happened to the elephant since February, or anything about any results from the blood sample, but I am on the case - I have asked the contacts I made in South India, including Balan. I am also looking for a Malayalam speaker to translate the TV report for me. A very early start for me, getting up in time to catch people in Kerala and in Bangalore by phone, is imminent. If I get any answers, I will squeeze this into the Pygmy Elephants book just in time for it to go to press.



A Kerala Forest and Wildlife Department sign - this one's from Neyyar-Peppara. Picture: copyright Matt Salusbury

Fortean Traveller - Kerali kallana capers

This article first appeared in Fortean Times FT 301, May 2013. (It's "Fortean Traveller" no. 85)



The south Indian state of Kerala is officially "God's own country", although I heard that Kerala Tourism appropriated the "God" phrase from a slogan they'd taken a fancy to after seeing it over the stall of a small Latin American country at a travel fair. In March 2011 took a couple of weeks off work and went to Kerala to investigate reports in the local English language press of kallana, the alleged pygmy elephant of that region.

One the attractions of this expedition was that Neyyar-Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary – reputed home to kallana - wasn’t exactly at the ends of the earth, or only reachable after months of trekking through wild and inhospitable jungle. Kallana’s alleged habitat was just 56km from the state capital and the international airport at Trivandrum. It was the equivalent of having a mystery animal in the South Downs just outside Brighton. Compared to the cryptids supposedly living in the wilds of Mongolia or half way up the Himalayas, kallana was right under our noses.

So I found myself in Indian's most laid-back state capital, Thiruvananthapuram, so good they named it twice. "Thiruvananthapuram" was a bit of a mouthful for the British when they moved into the then Kingdom of Travancore, so they adopted "Trivandrum", a three-syllable, anglicised version of city's name. The name means "Holy Snake City", after the huge statue of Lord Vishnu reclining on the serpent Anantha inside the main Padmanabhaswamy temple downtown. I only saw a drawing of its interior - like many Hindu temples in India, it's "closed to non-devotees."

It being India, getting hold of my star interviewee and kallana eyewitness Sali Palode proved complicated. He wasn't answering his agent's phone calls. Sali's non-availability gave me the opportunity to go upstate to briefly see some young captive elephants at Kodanad Elephant Camp, a facility for rescued elephants being trained for work in forestry and tourism. It was good to get up close to them, and to compare young conventionally-sized elephants with photos I'd seen of “kallana.”



A young captive elephant and his mahout in the Periyar River, Kodanad, Kerala

I naively imagined that elephants approaching would make the ground shake with their great feet, like something out of Godzilla. But as I stood on the banks of the Periyar River, watching the younger elephants being bathed by their mahouts, the only indication that another elephant - a tusker who must have been over eight feet high (almost 2 ½ metres) – was right behind me and gracefully advancing down the riverbank towards me, was when his mahout put his hand on my shoulder and politely asked me if I could get out of the way. The eight-foot tusker moved completely silently.

I was also mistaken in my belief that young elephants loved going into the river for a bath. They absolutely hated it. The mahouts somehow managed to subdue these beasts - that could have crushed them with ease - just by gently pulling their tails.

Down the road from the Kodanad was the sad little Kerala Forest Department (KFD) zoo for "rescued" animals, which was, frankly, a disgrace. Just down the road from that, however, the finishing touches were being put on its replacement, a spacious park with big enclosures where herds of animals could run in a near-wild state. Some of the deer had been moved in, and the chief warden of the "rescue centre" said its first rescued elephant was due to move in within a few months.

The warden, with some pride, asked me if I'd spotted another Kerali pygmy, "our own dwarf muntjac deer," as if his herd of little dog-sized, short-antlered, fanged, barking muntjac deer were the most exotic animals on the planet. I had to break it to him that, while muntjac may be native to Kerala, they were introduced to the grounds of English stately homes some time ago, from which they escaped and have now become so common they're widely regarded as vermin. To this the warden replied, with a wry smile, "That is the consequence of your folly!" He was presumably referring to the British conquest of India, and Britain's karma for this series of atrocities is being overrun by Indian muntjac.

Sali Palode's agent Balan Madhavan had finally tracked him down. I met them both at the Trivandrum Press Club. It was a noisy interview, as retired journalists - wandering in and out of the reading room where we talked - would interrupt to greet Balan. Sali was shy and retiring with short grey hair and glasses, and spoke quietly in Malayalam, with Balan's deep, more confident voice, interpreting for me in English.

A drawing teacher for the past 25 years, Sali taught at a Malayalam-medium school near the mountain town of Palode in the hills not far from Trivandrum, on the edge of the forest near where he grew up. From an early aged Sali would trek in the forest with his father or with friends form the local Kani "tribal" community. He eventually managed to borrow some photographic equipment and take photos of the wildlife he saw. He's since won over 70 awards, but Balan said all the money Sali's made from photography has been ploughed back into the kit, like the huge Canon lens I saw him use when we later went into the forest together.



Sali Palode at work with his camera in Neyar-Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary

Where did Sali first hear about kallana, I asked. From the "tribals". It was "25 years back, on a trek to the Agustya mountains, on the top." There Sali and his Kani guide Mallan Kani saw "small elephant droppings" that "belong to kallana."

Since that encounter a quarter of a century earlier, Sali and Mallan have been looking for kallana. Sali described how he first "got a picture in 2005" of a kallana, one of a group of four, (FT 252;42-47) and also photographed what he says is a dead adult female kallana by a lake. Kallana's stomping grounds are in the Neyyar-Peppara reserve, among the Agustya Mala hills, which have become a Hindu pilgrimage centre, and Sali says kallana is moving down from the higher altitudes due to "human intervention" on the hills. The animal is agile, and climbs uphill very fast, a feat which Sali has seen himself.

Sali pointed out that his kallana photos show "long limbs" and that "the skin is wrinkled", which he says is evidence that they're adults. What convinced Sali of that adulthood of the "tusker" male he photographed in 2010 were "skin details… long tail, really hairy". And then there were the tusks – certainly more developed that the ones I'd seen on younger elephants at Kodonad.

The search for one cryptid usually throws up some other unexpected mystery animals as well. Sali said a Kani elder had shown him another Kerali cryptid, a purple-bodied tree crab that lives in "gaps on trees". The Kani use this mystery tree crab as "medicine, for the ears". Balan mentioned another Kerali cryptid – the pogeyan, the "clouded leopard", an alleged smoky brown-grey leopard without spots, dwelling in the far north of Kerala, in grassland and "evergreens" of the Munnar region and moving in and out of the tea plantations of Malabar. He knows one forest officer who's seen a pogeyan.

"Warden Sharma" the Trivandrum District Chief Wildlife Warden, after an explanation from Balan of what we wanted to do, gave permission for me to enter the Neyyar-Peppara sanctuary, but only for the day, and only if accompanied by Sali and his guide, Mallan Kani.

Next day I got up very early for a possibly inadvisable 40km trip by motorized rickshaw turbo milk float, which meant I arrived ten minutes late for our rendezvous with Sali at the hill town of Vithura. As we passed a shiny suburban showroom for the new Indian-built Tato Nano economy car, my rickshaw driver said with disdain that his vehicle exceeded the 70kph maximum speed of a Tata Nano.



Sali Palode (left) and Malan Kani (right) in Neyyar-Peppara sanctuary, at the spot where they found the dead kellana in 2005

Soon Sali and I stood before the green and red sign of the Kerala Forest Department at the entrance to Neyar-Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary, where Sali's guide Mallan Kani was waiting. Mallan was a more outgoing character, and he and Sali had a Malayam-language Laurel and Hardy camaraderie thing going, as they marched off ahead through the thick forest at a brisk pace I could barely keep up with. "Faster!" Mallan would occasionally call to me. They had to wait for me once when I got my ear impaled on a dangling thorn.

We went through paddies and low-impact cashew and rubber plantations, and past an anti-elephant trench and Kani houses with solar panels. Then uphill and into deep forest. The trail was steep and narrow, and single-file. Mallan said it was an elephant track. It was difficult enough for humans, only the piles of elephant dung – with mushrooms growing out of it – told us these were elephant paths.

The forest was humid and I was sweating buckets by now. My heart was racing – it could be the altitude. Brilliant blue and white butterflies flitted around us, and there were biting ants that drew blood if you were foolish enough to sit down for long. Strange hooting whistling laughing birds called to us, one sounded like Mutley out of Wacky Races cursing.

Mallan took us on a steep downward descent to the spot where they found the body of the female elephant in 2005, by a lake with the Agusthya Mala in the distance behind. Then Mallan suddenly said, “Gaur! Guar!” although Sali and I saw and heard nothing, and he then disappeared into the forest, after getting Sali and I into cover behind some trees. Sali took out his massive Canon lens and screwed it into his camera, and crouched in the trees just ahead of me at the forest's edge.



Herd of gaur (wild Indian bison) stampede past

Ten minutes later came a thundering of hooves, and curly-horned gaur – wild bison - in a big herd appear to charge straight at us. Sali got up and started running. I decided to stay put, reasoning that the trees would stop them charging directly at me. They veered to the left and charged uphill – beards, calves and all, about 20 in total. Sali was running after the herd, camera at the ready. I missed most of it, having got tangled in a thicket. Following in the wake of the gaur came a cloud of stinging flies. Sali ripped a branch off a bush, and beat them away. Mallan re-appeared.

It seems he'd flushed out for the gaur for our benefit. Mallan's forestry skills were impressive. Some say that “kallana” are just young elephants playing a short distance from a herd that’s unseen and close by, but if the herd were close by, Mallan would know about it.

We were finished by 11.30. We stopped at the next Kani settlement. Plastic chairs were produced for Sali and I, and with a little bamboo ladder, one of the Kani neighbours went up a tree to bring down fresh coconuts for lunch, a rare privilege as access to "tribal" areas is usually restricted. Sali and I bade farewell to Mallan at the Forest Dept. post by the sanctuary's entrance. It was still lunch hour when two short bus rides later I was back in Trivandrum.

Sali and Balan have been tracking kallana for at least a decade, and had only three encounters and one dodgy sighting of its dung. The chances of me tripping over kallana – or even a conventional elephant – in the thick, thick forest, were never great.



Back in Trivandrum, I encountered statues of what were described as “unicorns” or “elephant dragons” – horse-bodied, eagle-clawed beasts with elephants’ heads, often associated with a small elephant that accompanies them.

Some grasped their trunks in their talons, some had trunks reaching down towards considerably smaller “baby elephants” whose trunks reached up to theirs. Some had small crests or tufts on their heads. Some had multiple tusks growing out of the sides of their mouth where their teeth should be, like the mouthparts of a monster prawn.

There were "elephant dragons" in the Maharaja of Travancore’s eighteenth-century palace, and in the huge temple next door. The palace and temple guides told me the "elephant dragons" were carved in the late eighteenth century, during Travancore’s zenith. I was told the makara are not exclusive to India, and there's been little research into their origins. Makara feature fleetingly in Bernard Heuvelmans' In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, but as sea creatures. The makara in Trivandrum, and on the coat of arms of the neighbouring State of Karnataka – were definitely land animals.

I also spent 24 hours in Bangalore, to see Asian elephant expert Prof. Raman Sukumar at the Indian Institute of Science, a university campus so vast it has its own airstrip.



Asian elephant expert Prof. Sukumar Raman

"Don't, whatever you do, come on the 31st of March, it's the end of the financial year," advised Prof. Sukumar. The Union Government in New Delhi demands all taxes are paid by the end of this date on pain of considerable penalties. The last day of the financial year is bedlam. Most banks are open all night for receipt of government revenues, still mostly done in cash. Sukumar has to reconcile the accounts of the IISc's Institute of Ecology he heads - by the end of a very long day. So we met on April Fool's Day instead.

Prof. Sukumar Raman is the expert on Asian elephants, but like every head of department he had a lot of admin to deal with. As well as having to sign leave requests for departmental staff during our interview, Sukumar was interrupted by a bizarre marketing call from a mobile company, following an inquiry about billing for SIM cards. It turned out the two SIM cards they were talking about were “for elephants” in radio collars awaiting deployment on elephants in West Bengal. He told me he had a hard time explaining to the mobile company that he didn’t know the mobile numbers for the SIM cards, as they were radio-tracking devices for elephants, and no, they didn't want free weekend calls...

Sali Palode's website has his photos of kallana, and of the tree crab (the latter on the "Insects" page).



This is an edited extract from Pymgy Elephants – on the track of the world's biggest dwarfs, published by CFZ Press later this year.

© Matt Salusbury 2013

Borneo elephants in the wild

Borneo elephants, photos copyright Carl Marshall, used with permission

Carl Marshall of the CFZ very kindly let me use his recent photos of two Borneo elephants, taken during a research expedition on the Kinabatangan River, Sabah (Malaysian Borneo). He was able to get really close to them by boat. He estimated that the bull elephant was seven feet tall. The Borneo elephants are known somewhat dubiously as "pygmy elephants".

The photo shows how big the Borneo elephants are, and also shows just how hard it is to get a clear view of something as big as an elephant, as they're hidden in thick vegetation for much of their lives. Most sightings of "pygmy elephants" in Africa and in Asia have been in and around rivers, as that's about the only place you'll get to take a look at them. In the thick forest they're hidden.

"Specimen 2980" small enough and light enough to hold in your arms

Photo: copyright Lars Thomas, used with permission, all rights reserved

Lars Thomas of the University of Copenhagen kindly sent me this photo of himself holding "Specimen 2980", the skull of a female elephant. Even though the photo shows Lars, a Dane, holding a skull, I will refrain from attempting to make amusing comparisons with Hamlet!

The skull is of an elephant shot by big game hunter Edmond Blanc in 1955 in South Cameroon, working on commission for a wealthy industrialist who collected specimens for the University's Natural History Museum. (There's also another - similar - skull of a female elephant from the same heard, 2981.) They were labelled "dwaergelefant" - "dwarf elephant."

Lars told me earlier that the skull is small enough and light enough that you can put your arms around it and lift it up. This compares with the the Museum's skulls of conventionally-sized adult forest elephants, which Lars says you can't even lift off the ground on your own. (These bigger skulls are on loan to the city's zoological gardens, where they're on display in a glass case, so no photos of these for comparison, I'm afraid.)

Based on his analysis of the skull and in particular the teeth, Lars told me that "one is definitely an adult, although very small in stature" and concluded that in one of these, the third set of molars was starting to appear "which would mean it is was at least 20 years old, probably around 25."

The Natural History Museum London's elephant and mammoth expert Prof. Adrian Lister felt the skulls were probably a juvenile or sub-adult, based on (he readily admitted) at a look at just some photos with an object next to them to give an idea of scale. Palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish of Southampton University told me these skulls were probably of juveniles, based on bones in the cheek not being fully fused yet.

My own view is that while it's probably not a pygmy elephant, there is good evidence for some sort of local "eco-type" or "clade" of smaller forest elephant in South Cameroon.

It seems no one had studied these skulls since they were delivered to Copenhagen over half a century ago, until I drew them to Lars' attention last year.

There's also the preserved skin of one of Copenhagen's Cameroon "dwarf" elephants, although it's under lock and key and inaccessible at the moment. Lars regrets to inform me that the specimens are "very low down on the DNA-lab priority list, so I have no idea when anybody will have time to look at those."

I also recently received permission to reproduce in the Pygmy Elephants book photos of a young elephant with "precocious tusk growth" from Uganda in the 1950s - the photographer Dr Clive Spinage, still very much alive, says there were forest elephant/savannah elephant hybrids in the area at the time", so it could have been one of these. You'll have to wait till Pygmy Elephants comes out to see the photo though, as with the photos of Borneo elephants in the wild kindly sent to me by Carl Marshall, recently returned from an expedition to Sabah.

"Pygmy elephants" poisoned

There has been a lot of talk in the news media about "pygmy elephants" being poisoned in Borneo. Numerous friends and relations contacted me in a state of some urgency, some quite late at night to tell me about this.

While ten elephants in Borneo have undoubtedly died from poisioning, even the World Wildlife Fund, which seems to be on the side of the sustainable wildlife tourism industry in the bit of Malaysia that's on the island of Borneo, admitted some time ago on its website that the "pygmy elephants" of Borneo were only six inches (15cm) shorter than the average height of Asian elephants on the mainland and among the nearest populations on islands. The Sumatran elephant, for example, is recognised as a sub-species that's one of the smallest in Asia, but it's about the same size as the Borneo elephant and no one is claiming the Sumatran elephant is a pygmy. It starts at around 6ft 6 inches in height at the shoulder for a fully-grown adult

I came across a comparison chart on a World Wildlife Fund site a few years ago (I can't seem to find it online now but someone has reproduced it here). As you can see, the Borneo elephants aren't much smaller than mainland Asian elephants.

One of the foremost experts on fossil elephants and mammoths, who's also very good on living elephants, told me he'd been to Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) and pointed a laser rangefinder at at least one of the elephants there. He told me he couldn't determine any difference in height between them and other Asian elephants, based on the data from the rangefinder. You'll have to see the forthcoming Pygmy Elephants book to find out which expert this was. I can reveal that he went on record for the first time about this when he talked to me and later corresponded with me on the subject.

The problem is that "pygmy" and "dwarf" have never been properly defined.

The Guardian said that the Borneo elephant was recognised as a sub-species in 2003. While it was recognised as a unique and genetically distinct population at that time, isolated from other populations for a very long time (around 300,000 years) as far as I am aware the sub-species designation Elephas maximus borneensis is still unofficial.

Looking at some of the recent photos of the poisoned and dead Borneo elephants, you can see their characteristic big heads. Some of the photos also show some Malaysians standing next to a corpse.

I don't know what the average height is for people from Sabah, but even assuming they're only five feet in height, that would make the dead adult elephant they're standing next to at least six or seven foot at the shoulder. The photo I found of the "dead adult elephant" being measured shows a different elephant to the - bigger - dead mother elephant, and seems to show a smaller individual, which may not be fully grown. Female Asian elephants - in India at least - start to have babies before they've finished growing, and they're still growing until around the age of 30.

My mum asked me what the survival chances were of the pitiful looking baby elephant next to the dead body of its mother. That depends largely on the availability of coconuts on Sabah. Elephant vet Dr Joseph Cheeran told me that very young elephants found lost and alone in the forest have a better chance of survival in the more tropical South India than in the north. That's because coconuts are readily available for free, and coconut milk closely mimics "fatty" elephant milk. I don't know if they have any tradition of hand-rearing baby elephants in Sabah, though. The elephants there are regarded as "wild" and never domesticated as far as I'm aware - confusing press reports on alleged illegal sales of Borneo elephants to zoos in China notwithstanding.

"Precocious Tusk Growth" and a provisional front cover

This is the - very provisional - front cover image for Pygmy Elephants. The CFZ's preferred house-style plural is "dwarfs" with an "s", so I will be going through the book changing all the examples of "dwarves" with a "v" - there aren't that many, fortunately.

In devising a subtitle for the book, my publisher Jon Downes of the CFZ and myself were both surprised to discover there is no synonym for "elephant" according to Jon's thesaurus. Jon suggested "world's smallest pachyderms", but I thought pachyderms might include rhinos or manatees or hyraxes or something. Jon sought "pachyderm" on a search engine (other search engines are available!) and found that it was an outmoded order that includes everything from elephants to pigs, so pygmy elephants would not be the world's smallest pachyderm by a long way!

The cover is awaiting approval from the photographer upon whose photo my sketch of the pygmy elephant is loosely based, there are - I believe - "moral rights" issues here, so we'll have to wait and see for a couple of weeks whether he feels it's good to go. I wouldn't want to do anything "disparaging to his honour or reputation" in the words of UK copyright law.

Meanwhile, I've got a translation from the German-language Zeitschrift der Kolner Zoo report on a 1980s sighting of - allegedly - herds of pygmy elephants in clearings near the River Yobe, Central African Republic. The witness said they came into the clearings to lick salt and other minerals on the ground. Thanks to my colleague Mike Holderness for the translation. He noted that the report was badly written in its original language.

I also tracked down some articles from Mammalia in French from the 1960s, in which naturalist Pierre Pfeffer expresses the opinion that there's no such thing as pygmy elephants, having looked at the evidence up to then.

Several screw-ups by the normally excellent British Library meant that I had to make three trips to this noble institution to see an article of one bloody page by C A Spinage, now Dr Clive Spinage, in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London from 1958. After all that hassle, it was an article of one bloody page, but with a photo I didn't know about. This showed a clearly infant elephant in a group with other young elephants, and this elephant had much more developed tusks than its older peers.

I tracked down the photographer, Dr Clive Spinage, who is very much alive over half a century later and who gave me permission to reproduce the photo in the book. He also said in Uganda in the 1950, where he worked in wildlife conservation, there was "a number of herds of intermediate forest/bush elephant types" around.

Spinage's article on "Precocious Tusk Growth" is positively the last item I need to look up. There was said (by Bernard Heuvelmans) to be pygmy elephants "staying" in Antwerp Zoo, whose archives were transferred to the City of Antwerp's Felix Archives in 2009, but I've had a look at the archive catalogue and it's not organised in any way that's useable, and I don't fancy a Eurostar ride and a long weekend in Antwerp just on the off-chance that something turns up. I'll have to let it go.

Elefante enano in "Spanish Guinea"

The Spanish colony of Rio Muni in West Africa only came Spain's way as compensation for a territorial swap with the Portuguese in Latin America in 1810, and the Spanish were never that enthusiastic about the little territory, squashed up on the coast between French Gabon to the south and German (later French and British) Cameroon to the North. Serious efforts by the Spanish to develop the colony only started in the 1930s.

It only formally became "Spanish Guinea" in 1958, in a merger with the much less neglected coffee and cocoa-growing island colony of Ferdinando Poo just off the coast. Unimpressive though Spain's little African empire was, it was just big enough to contain - allegedly - a pygmy elephant.

The elefante enano (pygmy elephant) of what's now Equatorial Guinea was shot by a Spanish army captain in the 1950s, at a time when the colony was being formally prepared for independence. It was in the commune of Nsok, right on the border with Gabon.

It was written up in La Vida Animal in La Guinea Espanol, published in 1962 (front cover shown here), in a report of nearly two whole pages (longer than most reports of pygmy elephant shootings or sightings). I'm in the process of getting it translated and trying to track down and write to its publishers, the now probably defunct Instituto del Estudios Africanos in Madrid, with a view to reproducing Mr. H. Garcia's photo of Captain Chacorro posing next to the weird-looking smooth-skinned six-footer elephant he's just brought down.

Elephas falconeri startled by territorial swan

An imagined scene from the forthcoming Pygmy Elephants book - the smallest known pygmy elephant, Elephas falconeri, had no known predators but may well have got too close to a bad-tempered swan occasionally, as in this encounter at the edge of a shallow lake somewhere in Sicily half a million years ago.

Image copyright Matt Salusbury

Mainland giant and island pygmy teeth, Elephant nain du Gabon

Here are some recent illustrations for the Pygmy Elephants book, there are now only a handful that still need doing.

The one above shows a molar (tooth) from the presumed mainland ancestor of the Mediterranean pygmy elephants, Elephas antiquus. That's the big black one. Shown to scale is a tooth of its smallest presumed descendent - Elephas falconeri. They're based on teeth I've seen and handled "backstage" at the Natural History Museum, London.

Here's my rough sketch inspired by descriptions of and visual material (drawings and photographs) on l'elephant nain du Gabon, an alleged "loud, aggressive... crop-destroying" pygmy elephant shot in 1948 in the then French colony of Gabon, West Africa. The European-looking man might be Monsieur Moirand, principal controller of waterways and forests for that colony. The remains of the elephant ended up in the Natural History Museum, Paris, where a 2003 DNA analysis concluded it was an ordinary forest elephant, Loxodonta cyclotis.

Slight delay - meanwhile Oslo dwarf hippo, Oxford juvenile elephant

Pygmy Elephants is now expected to be finished and handed in to the publisher in early October. The original plan was to hand it in during Weird Weekend in mid-August, which came and went with no book finished.

Some work is still needed on the prehistoric pygmy elephants chapter, "incredible shrinking mammoths" (palaeontological evidence suggests the mammoths were getting successively smaller over their last generations in Siberia and Wrangel Island, and in other, earlier populations too), and on the "island dwarves, island giants, island forests" chapter.

On the subject of island dwarves, I saw this skeleton of Hippopotamus madagascariensis, the dwarf hippo of Madagascar, at the Natural History Museum, Oslo, It may have been finished off by the first arriving humans on the island. The skull is about a third the size of an adult conventionally-sized hippo's skull.

There are still a few things that need looking up and/or checking again before Pygmy Elephants can go to press - a source regarding a German team of anthropologists from the University of Gottingen, said to have filmed a group of pygmy elephants in the Central African Republic in the 1980s whilst studying the Binga people of the forest, Lucien Blancou and his apparent change of mind on whether there are pygmy elephants, and so on.

I've been busy. Zoologist Lars Thomas, who uncovered for me two skulls of alleged female pygmy elephants that had lain forgotten in the University of Copenhagen Museum, was a speaker at Weird Weekend. He told me at WW that he could put his arms round these skulls, while the museum had skulls of adult Loxodonta cyclotis (forest elephants) that he couldn't even lift off the ground. He says there's also the hardened, dried skin of one of the alleged South Cameroon pygmy elephants, and doesn't rule out a DNA sample eventually. The University of Copenhagen is gaining something of a reputation for DNA analysis, so they've got a bit of backlog right now!

Palaeontologist Darren Naish and zoologist Max Blake, also at Weird Weekend took a look at Lars' photos of the South Cameroon skulls and agreed - based on the limited information available - that they seemed to be of an adult or sub-adult. I may also have found someone to write a foreward to the book.

I saw the above reconstruction in a display at the Natural History Museum, Oslo of Elephas falconeri, aka Paleoloxodon falconeri, the smallest known pygmy elephant, from Sicily, around 100,000 years ago. The reconstruction here has a big domed head, although at least one recent description of E. falconeri points out that its (proportionally big) head isn't as domed as its mainland ancestor.

I also recently visited the Museum of Natural History, Oxford, where there's a skeleton of a three-year-old infant Asian elephant, interesting to compare it to alleged pygmies. As can be seen from the skull, the sutures aren't yet fused. A lot of the tusk development on this skeleton - if not all of it - won't have protruded from under the gums. The human standing next to it is almost exactly my height - just over 6ft 3.

All photos copyright Matt Salusbury