Quite big for pygmies - Fortean Times review of Pygmy Elephants

This first appeared in Fortean Times, FT 320 (November 2014) and is reproduced here with the permission of both the review's author, Dr Karl Shuker and Fortean Times editor David Sutton.

Quite big for pygmies

Unknown animals are not generally as conspicuous as widely
photographed but oddly shadowy pygmy elephants

Pygmy Elephants - On the Track of the World's Largest Dwarfs

Matt Salusbury
CFZ Press (Bideford), 2013
Paperback, 314 pp, illustrated, glossary, bibliography, index, ISBN 9781909488151
FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £12.00

The Tasmanian wolf or thylacine is often dubbed the world's most common extinct animal on account of the number of unverified sightings since the last confirmed specimen died in 1936. By that reckoning, pygmy elephants must rate not only as the world's largest dwarfs but also as the world's most conspicuous unknown animals, since alleged pygmy elephants have been filmed in the wild close-up and with a clarity unlike the ill-defined blobs normally characteristic of cryptid images.

Specimens have been kept in major zoos around the world and preserved in museums after their deaths, yet their zoological status has remained controversial. Faced with such a shadowy, scientifically anonymous history given such animals' corporeal presence (a history stretches back over a century in terms of Western knowledge, let alone the countless ages of native knowledge), it is perhaps inevitable that it has taken until the second decade of the 21st century to have an entire book devoted to pygmy elephants.The wait has been worthwhile.

The first four chapters of this fact-fest on pygmy elephants documents the fascinating range of island-endemic prehistoric forms, some of which survived into (semi-) modern times, and the tendency towards dwarfism or gigantism that frequently occurs as a consequence of insular evolution. The proboscidean examples merit a book of their own. Chapter 5 sets the scene for documenting the African pygmy elephant by revealing how taxonomic splitters delineated the African forest elephant from the African savannah elephant. They promoted it to a separate, second African species of elephant in its own right, thus providing a precedent for discovering a 'new' species in the modern scientific age.

Chapters 6-8 are devoted to the African pygmy elephant, documenting its history and recorded specimens. Some researchers have categorised it as a valid species in its own right; others have discounted it as

merely a juvenile form or even a dwarfed, teratological version of the forest elephant. (This mirrors the early scientific history of the pygmy hippopotamus relative to the much larger common hippopotamus). Also included here is a detailed account of the West African water elephant, a semi-aquatic cryptid that has long been a favourite of mine.

Chapters 9- 10 focus upon the kallana, or Asian pygmy elephant, in its permutations and document the bizarre mouse-sized 'water weevil' elephants - small but supposedly deadly mini-beasts that occasionally turn up in dried form on eBay. The author visited India to interview kallana eyewitnesses and obtained photos previously unpublished outside the subcontinent. There is much new information here in addition to the historical literature.

The final chapter considers the likelihood that pygmy elephants exist; the author concludes that they do not. How, then, can the specimens and filmed evidence be explained? To discover how he seeks to resolve this paradox, you'll have to read the book! There are illustrations throughout the text, many of which were new to me.

There is a useful glossary, an illustrated identification guide and a detailed bibliography. But what about websites that were consulted during research and have subsequently vanished? This is a bane for authors in the Internet age, but thanks to an addendum to the bibliography, readers can rediscover these ostensibly lost sources, which is great news.

It's customary to find things to gripe about when reviewing a book, but I found little. One minor source of frustration, however, is that the list of contents does not include page numbers for the chapters (a contents page with numbers is here, sorry!), so the only way to find, say, Chapter 6, is to flick through the book. There is the inevitable sprinkling of factual errors that pop up in any work bristling with facts and figures. To quote just one example: it was Maurice Rothschild, not Baron Walter Rothschild, who purchased an anomalous tusk in an Addis Ababa ivory market in the early 20th century.

Overall, however, this is an absorbing read. I do not agree with all of the author's conclusions about the validity or otherwise of pygmy elephants. However, his diligent compilation, presentation and analysis of the hitherto disparate history and facts about these enigmatic animals, plus his own addition of important new data to their archive of material as exclusively revealed in this book, make it a publication very deserving to be read by everyone interested in such creatures. If you're looking for information on stature-challenged pachyderms, this is the publication to consult.

Karl Shuker

Fortean Times Verdict

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

No Christmas tree would be complete without... dinosaurs!

In place of a fairy I have a Utahraptor on the top of my tree, with a Dilophosaurus climbing towards it. And yes, if you look closely, that is a Dalek between them!




As you can see, the dinosaurs on my tree are mostly therapods. (Their sticking-out arms mean they grip better round the branches.) But can you spot the obscure South American prehistoric mammal on the left?





The tree with dinosaurs, with lights deployed.



Any what would a Christmas tree be without a pygmy elephant? This one's just over 2cm long.

For more on the Haringey Paleontology Museum in Exile collection, see here.

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.