Proofreading is coming along nicely

Proofreading of the publisher's first draft of Pygmy Elephants is coming along nicely. I am almost done.

Kallana capture - more reports and an unhelpful Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador hoax

There's more emerging in both the English-language Kerali and Malayalam language on the alleged "kallana" pygmy elephant captured near Paruthpally in February. It seems to take a while for news reports to make their way to a place in the www.google.in rankings where you have a chance of finding them. The sheer size of India (and its cyberspace), with a population of over a billion, may have something to do with this.

There's a Malayalam news report showing footage of the elephant in captivity, and an interview with wildlife photographer Sali Palode and Kani tracker Malan Kani. There's also Jain Angadi's 2010 photo of a male kallana back up on India Nature Watch (the site was down for a while, then up again minus its photos.)

Another Malayalam news report has the footage of the kallana before capture, with a scale superimposed on it showing it to be just over five feet high at its highest point - the apex of its humped back. There's also a studio interview with Sali and another who I couldn't identify, as I can't read Malayalam. The report also has an extract from a press conference with a Kerala government official who mentions the English words "chief wildlife warden" - he's probably a senior Forest Department wildlife official.

The New India Express article Of Myths and Legends: the kallana story, also from February, quotes E A Jayson, a senior wildlife biologist at Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI), as saying the chance of kallana exisiting is not great, due to the lack of evidence. Kerala Forests Department's V Gopinath, Principal Chief Conservator (Wildlife), states in the article that "What we have found was a young malnourished male elephant. It is a six-year-old calf, not the pygmy as claimed by tribespeople."

Former KFRI research scientist K M Jayahari claimed in the article to have seen the creature in 2003, and expresses the opinion that it's not a calf, based on its behaviour, but admits he only saw one individual, not a herd. There's also an unnamed WWF India official who says we "shouldn't brush aside" reports of the kallana, and that that Kani have been right about wildlife in the past.

An English-language Kerali blog, probably translating Malayalam news sources, claimed that Kerala Forest Minister Shri Ganesh Kumar had ordered the setting up of a committee to investigate kallana and establish its identity. A ministerial announcement is expected (eventually).

Enter Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador, in what appears to be the first kallana hoax, in a field that had been remarkably free of hoaxers and the preserve of admirably sincere people up to now.

The Internet Chronicle article on kallana - just before the capture at Paruthypally - claimed that "a recent expedition led by Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador, an expert pachyderm biologist, returned with conclusive genetic evidence proving the ‘Kallana’ are, in fact, a distinct species of dwarf elephant."

The Internet Chronicle's web address is www.chronicle.su - the .su domain denotes the Soviet Union, defunct since 1990, which should send alarm bells ringing. As should the ridiculous name. And for those still in doubt, the Internet Chronicle lists Cesse Poole, Dr Oy Vay, and the late Colonel Muammar al Gaddafi among its other contributors. Neither would any serious biologist call themselves a "pachyderm biologist" – the term "pachyderm" describes a no-longer accepted order of mammals – everything from pigs, rhinos, hippos and elephants – that is no longer in use.

Dr Angstrom H. Troubador turns up as an expert – a cancer oncologist or nuclear safety specialist or whatever, all over the web, with reports originating at The Internet Chronicle. To its credit, even the normally shockingly uncritical blogosphere is full of comments like "Is this real?" and "Looks fake to me" alongside Dr Angstrom H. Troubador's supposed pronouncements on the discovery of mummified dinosaurs, Fukishima nuclear fallout heating up the Pacific, the death by cannabis overdose of "Chumlee" Russell from the TV show Pawn Stars, etc. (No, I've not heard of Chumlee Russell either.)

The much more legitimate New India Express report refers to "rumours of DNA profiling being done on the captured elephant to confirm that it is not a separate sub-species". This may originate from The Internet Chronicle's Dr Angstrom H. Troubador hoax, fuelled by the actual news report that a blood sample had been taken from the captive elephant, and media commentary back in 2005 when the dead female kallana was found about what a good idea it would be had a DNA sample been taken.

Pygmy Elephants is with the publishers now and I'm reading the first proofs. I will find a way to include the above in the final version.

Working on the Pygmy Elephant proofs now, and ISBN

The first proofs for Pygmy Elephants came back from the publisher much sooner than expected, I am working on them now, and will shortly be mobilising my support networks of proofreaders to cast their eyes over it.

Meanwhile, there is an ISBN for Pygmy Elephants already - ISBN 976-1-905723-40-9

Elephantulus gaffs

My publisher assures me Pygmy Elephants will be out in time for Christmas. I can expect the proofs in about a month.

Meanwhile, a couple of revisions and additions have been agreed.

There's one photo of an alleged pygmy elephant from Gabon in the 1950s whose copyright owner I couldn't trace. A global expert on copyright has assured my that my unsuccessful attempts to trace the French copyright owner constitute "due diligence", and that it's an anonymous work and I can include it in the book as such. So there's another photo that'll go in.

Prof. Sukumar Raman in Bangalore emailed me a short comment about the elephant captured in Kerala said - by some - to be a pygmy, which will be included.

And thanks to the "wild talents" for librarianship of Richard Muirhead, I have a new, short section on "Thai water elephants," tiny, fist-sized shrivelled bodies of miniscule elephants said to have venemous tusks. This is nonsense of course. They are almost certainly "gaffs," fake monsters made from the body parts of real dead animals. In this case they are thought to be elephant shrews (one genus of African elephant shrews, aka sengis, aka jumping shrews) is Elephantulus.

Shown here are my "artist's impressions" of Elephantulus gaffes passed off as miniature Thai "water elephants", and their X-rays.

Drawings copyright Matt Salusbury

Today I sent Pygmy Elephants to the publisher

Pygmy Elephants on a memory stick was finally posted to the publisher, CFZ Press, earlier today. Hurrah! The next stage will be checking the proofs when the publisher sends them, and Lars Thomas's foreword arriving. Watch for updates on when the book's coming out.

Shown above (without the captions not yet added) is the identification chart of alleged recently living pygmy elephants, compared to their conventionally-sized relatives, from Pygmy Elephants.

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