"Pygmy Pachyderms" updated

After having talked again to Dr Victoria Herridge of the Natural History Museum, London, I have updated the "Pygmy Pachyderms" article from Fortean Times 251, to reflect her correction of my misunderstanding of what she'd told me back in 2007.

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.

Ege University's "Syrian elephant"

Syrian elephant, Ege University Natural History Museum, used with permission

This is the "Syrian elephant" from the Natural History Museum of Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, the image is produced with their permission. (Thanks to Prof Dr Tanju Kaya, and to my Turkophone translator, who ticked the "no publicity" box.)

It shows the skeleton of a "Syrian elephant" from Karamanmarash in "Southeastern Turkey" (the majority Kurdish region of the country), and seems to be a reconstruction based on a partial skeleton (the dark bits) with the remainder of the bones (lighter) worked out from the extant remains. As my translator is a much better linguist than he is a zoologist, I'm having a very slow conversation with Prof Dr Kaya about how old the elephant was at the time of death, how tall the skeleton is, and what age the skeleton is in hundreds or thousands of years. Updates will be provided when I get answers to these. (The museum's website says the skeleton is 4m high, which would make it equivalent to a large adult male Indian elephant, up there with some of the bigger Sri Lankan males.)

The Syrian elephant, which was an Asian elephant variety that lived in what's now Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, was the war elephant of choice for the Egyptians, the successor states of Alexander the Great's empire and for the Romans. Capturing Syrian elephants for war meant not having to go all the way to India for very expensive imported war elephants and even more expensive mahouts. I've seen the Syrian elephant described as a sub-species, Elephas maximus asuras (Ege University goes with this designation) although this seems as far as I could find out, unofficial and a little dodgy. I've heard various timelines for "E. maximus asurus", ranging from three million years ago to 2,000 years ago to as recently as 200BCE.

Some sources describe the Syrian elephant as slightly smaller than the mainstream Indian E. maximus, which would make it easier to handle as a war animal. Some depictions in ancient art show the Syrian elephant as having slender, curving tusks, as in the Ege University skeleton, although I've yet to learn whether the tusks in this reconstruction are the original tusks found with the skeleton or conjectural.

Some, including Darren Naish in his Tetrapod Zoology blog have pointed out the similarity between the possibly slim-tusked Syrian elephant and the small elephant being led by Syrian emissaries in the tomb of Rekh-mi-re in ancient Egypt (my drawing of the elephant from photos of the tomb below. See also here for a recent photograph, although the frescoes have faded in recent years). Naish suggests that this doesn't show a pygmy elephant (or a baby elephant, as I suggest in the forthcoming Pygmy Elephants book,) but is an attempt to draw an out-of-scale Syrian elephant.

More detail to follow.

"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.