Broccosaurus Rex! Broccoli-eating sauropod dinosaur

Broccosaurus Rex! This broccoli-eating dinosaur, on packaging from a broccoli grower based in Lincolnshire, was spotted outside a village store in Reydon, Suffolk. I'm told the depiction of sauropods bouyed up by water is no longer considered accurate, and perhaps a paleobotanist could tell me whether broccoli was a contemporary Mesozoic plant? (Photo: Matt Salusbury)

Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Combined Circus' "herd of pygmy elephants" arrives in Springfield, Mass (1937)

Three "pygmy elephants" of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus - named as Nuba, Bull and Loka - were reported by the Springfield Republican (Springfield, Mass.) of 18 June 1937 as arriving in town.

The first thing I noted from the photographs of these elephants (and from posters of them featuring drawings that I've seen, I'll add links later) is that the tusks look dodgy. They're way to long and straight for an African elephant (savannah or forest), reaching almost to the ground. They look like prosthetic add-ons that would fit over the very small tusks juvenile African elephants would have. (There's also a possibility that the circus had found some African savannah elephants showing "precocious tusk growth" – there's a photo of this in Pygmy Elephants.)

Two of these elephants are probably the same two specimens of "Abele" referred to in Exploration du Parc National Albert, Mission S. Frenchkop (1937-38) by Serge Frenchkop (Brussels, 1943). As I describe in Pygmy Elephants, discussing elephants in and around the Belgian Empire's National Parks system, Frenchkop's report notes that "Major Offermann distinguishes another, third type of Elephant, l'Eléphant Nain (dwarf elephant) known in the region of the Elephant Domestication Station with the vernacular name of "Abele", and which lives to the North of Api and does not measure more that 1m 30 or 1m 40 in height. The general aspect of "Abele" would be that of Loxodonta africana cyclotis, save for the size. This would seem to permit me to suppose that the "Abele" is nothing more than a young "Tembo" [forest elephant in the local language]. M. Offermann who has had the occasion to observe the growth of two "Abele" admits, elsewhere, to these having been sold to America, he could not continue his observations." No mention is made of extraordinary long tusks on "Abele", which you would have thought Offerman would have commented on.

Contemporary posters show that one of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus attractions touring the US around 1936-38 was a "Herd of the Smallest Fully Grown Pigmy Elephants on the Face of the Globe!". This, and the above newspaper article, make me wonder if it's possible that two of these could have been the young "Abele"-type elephants from the area around the Domestication Station whose growth Monsieur Offerman was no longer able to observe.

The African mahouts ride these little elephants in exactly the same way as in Armand Dennis's 1936 documentary film Wheels Across Africa, in which mahouts ride adult African forest elephants from the Domestication Station that pull Dennis's Dodge truck across a river.

Thanks again to Richard Muirhead for finding this article.

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.

Dortmund Zoo's director on a climbing Sumatran elephant and a very small elephant in Giza, Egypt

Naeema, an adult female (forest?) elephant in Giza Zoo, Egypt in the 1990s, only 1.8 metres high, and understood to be still living in that zoo. Photo: copyright Dr Frank Brandstätter

I recently got some unexpected Pygmy Elephants fan-mail from Dr Frank Brandstätter, Director of Dortmund Zoo.

Dr Brandstätter in the 1990s did some research for zoologist Wolfgang Böhme, who is mentioned in Pygmy Elephants in the context of 1980s reports of sightings of African pygmy elephants - "Zwergelefanten" in German sources co-authored by Böhme. Brandstätter notes that the 2005 standard work Mammal Species of the World lists Loxodonta pumilio (the alleged African pygmy elephant species or sub-species) "as a synonym for L. cyclotis" (the African forest elephant).

Pygmy Elephants looks into the great agility attributed to the alleged Asian pygmy elephant kallana. On the agility of one adult Asian elephant in particular, Brandstätter says, "when I was responsible for Neunkirchen Zoo, a small zoo in the Southwest of Germany, from 1995 to 2000 we had two Asian Elephants of which one, 'Chiana', was a female Sumatran Elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus), aged approximately 30 yrs old by then. She had the typical features of a Sumatran Elephant: larger ears in comparison to the head, a shoulder height of 2 metres, a very light grey colouring and a flat forehead. She was very fond of climbing and even succeeded to climb and leave behind the massive steel fence (1.8 m) that surrounded the elephant enclosure."

"This she only did, when she was trying to reach interesting trees to far away for her to reach with the trunk. To climb the fence she had first to step with her forefeet on the upper steel bar and then to step with at least one of her hindfeet on the lower steel bar. When she was up there she simply lend over and fell to the other side. It was interesting for me to see, how good a climber an elephant could be."

The other elephant in the enclosure, "Samba", a female Indian Elephant (Elephas maximus maximus) was bigger and with typical outlines like the domed head and a high shoulder, and smaller ears, but approx. 2.4 m height, never tried to climb the fence."

"Both elephants had no problem climbing the steep and sandy hill, that was in their enclosure. They even liked to dig terraces in the slope where they could lay down and get up comfortably, which was much easier than lying on a flat surface." Both elephants have since died. He described this in a German-language article The latter I described in an article (BRANDSTÄTTER F. (1998): "Elefanten in Neunkirchen", Zoo magazin Süd Herbst/Winter 1998: 40-43. ). Sumatran elephants are regarded as the smallest accepted Asian elephant sub-species.

Brandstätter also described "a surprisingly small" female African elephant named Naeema, "as far as I could find out... still alive" in Giza Zoo (now Egypt Zoo) in Cairo, Egypt. He first encountered Naeema in 1992. Brandstätter soon came to regard Naeema as a forest elephant, based on her "reaching only 1.8 m in height, had a flat head and longer face and the typical round ears." He was kind enough to give me permission to reproduce his photo of Naeema above. 1.8 metres for an adult forest elephant is very small indeed, I've not heard any accurate measurements of any adult forest elephants being that small.

There's more from Brandstätter on the German-language Wesen der Edda. Band I. Was die Edda bisher verschwieg by archaeologist Rainer Mekelburg, on the possibility that "raging wild boar" in the mythology of both the Greeks and the Vikings were based on pygmy elephants or pygmy mammoths, and a reference to a small African elephant used for ploughing that appears in an illustration in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia from 1545. A post on this will follow shortly.

9 out of 10 for Pygmy Elephants in Fortean Times review

Dr Karl PN Shuker's review of Pygmy Elephants in the current issue of Fortean Times (FT 320, November 2014):

"If you're looking for information on stature-challenged pachyderms, this is the publication to consult"

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT VERY SMALL ELEPHANTS, 9/10

Full review to follow on this website.

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.

Pygmy stegodons on "Twilight Beasts"

There's a recent guest post from me on Twilight Beasts, the go-to blog for "neglected Pleistocene taxons". It's on pygmy stegodons, and features extracts and illustrations from Pygmy Elephants.