PYGMY ELEPHANTS IS OUT NOW!

Pygmy Elephants - the book - is out! It's available to buy on Amazon and will be on the CFZ Cryptoshop shortly.

For US (and Italy) online sales, see here.

At the time of writing (March 2014) there's a special offer via the "Bloggo" (blog) of Pygmy Elephants publishers CFZ - yours for a tenner, via Pay Pal. But hurry, hurry while this offer lasts!

For those of you still with an attachment to buying books in an actual shop with cash, a few copies of Pygmy Elephants are available to buy, from a human being into whose hand you can press said cash, at these outlets in London.

The Butterfly Farm near Stratford-Upon-Avon also told me they planned to stock Pygmy Elephants in their gift shop.

Last time I checked, there were at least two copies on sale (at a discount) at the Big Green Bookshop and Freedom Bookshop, both in London.

Pygmy Elephants - back cover text

Since the dawn of the twentieth century – and possibly earlier – reports came from the deep forests of Africa of "pygmy elephants" as little as five feet (1.52m) tall at the shoulder.

There were pygmy elephant sightings, and alleged pygmy elephant skulls and skins were sent to Europe's museums. There were even some living elephants of the pygmy species Loxodonta pumilio on display in zoos. Circus showman PT Barnum had pygmy elephants in his menagerie, and pygmy elephant sightings – with photos and film footage - continued into the 1980s.

The author travelled to India to interview eyewitnesses to kallana – the mystery five-feet tall elephant whose name translates as the "stone elephant" because it scrambles with such agility over rocks. This book includes photos of kallana never before reproduced outside India.

And research for this book uncovered pygmy elephant skulls that had lain forgotten in a museum store for over half a century.

This investigation also takes in the confusing differences between the known species of modern African elephant, and possible hybrid elephants. The pygmy elephants, it turns out, may not be all that they seem…

All this, and a mystery tree crab too!

ZOOLOGY/HISTORY OF SCIENCE

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!

Second proof is ready, index all but done, availability by Christmas looking likely

I've finished the second - and possibly final - proof of Pygmy Elephants, and I'm merging my corrections with those of my proofreader, a zoology graduate and former professional indexer.

The index is done, but it needs some savage cuts. So names for different types of elephants in local African languages have to go: "m'paa" and "n'zerre" will regrettably not feature in the index. My favourite index entries that will (hopefully) make it into the final version are "Caesar, Julius - disparaging of war elephants" and "tapir - fossil tapir skull misidentified as elephant's".

Julius Caesar had a low opinion of war elephants as they took too long to train, in his opinion, while the great comparative anatomist and zoologist Baron Georges Cuvier, in one several works on the bones of fossil and extant elephants, concluded that a fossil skull identified as that of a prehistoric elephant was that of a "big tapir."

You'll have to buy the book to find out more. My publisher assures me that there are more than likely to be copies available in time for Christmas, postage permitting, with a bit of last-minute pre-Christmas guerrilla marketing. The book launch party, which promises to be a bit of a wild one as it's been so long since I've thrown any kind of party, will have to wait till beyond the New Year, simply because of the impossibility of getting any kind of venue for it this close to Christmas.

Mammoths also feature in Pygmy Elephants, including several varieties of pygmy mammoths, and some populations of mammoths that were possibly shrinking over successive generations. Shown here is a conventionally-sized woolly mammoth painted on the shutter of a shop in Middlesex Street, London E1, part of parade of shops with Ice Age fauna. If it were to scale, it would be about the height of some of the pygmy mammoths, although the proportions would probably be different. And not all of the pygmy mammoths would have been woolly.

Photo copyright Matt Salusbury, mammoth image copyright the artist

Anomalous elephants

Karl Shuker's excellent blog covers some of the mythical beasts and anomalous elephants I mention in the Pygmy Elephants book, out soon. There's a whole section on them in Chapter 1.

There's a baku (also spelt "bakua") a mythical Japanese nightmare-eating animal possibly based on a tapir, here.

And there are white (or pink) elephants, and - from Ta'ng Dynasty China - black-skinned, pink-tusked elephants. As I note in Pygmy Elephants, Asian elephants who work on the parades circuit in the hot August sun in India often have a blackened, sunburnt appearance (I've seen one), while the ivory of African forest elephants has a greyish-pink tinge compared to that of savannah elephants. The pink tinge was used to trace the origin of suspect illegal ivory shipments.

And above is a photo of magnificent - and entirely fantastic - elephant squid in Hanbury Street, in Shoreditch, London - notorious haunt of art students. It appears to be an African savannah elephant squid. Photo: copyright Matt Salusbury. I'm told the graffiti artist has only a "thin" copyright in law, as they are, after all, committing a criminal offence.

Corrected proof at the publishers now

The corrected first proof of Pygmy Elephants is at the publishers as I write, I'm expecting the second proof soon. Meanwhile, I'm getting the index ready, and putting together the text for the back cover. I've got a zoology graduate on standby to quickly read the second proof once I've finished with it. Here's the front cover already.

For reasons too complicated to go into, the photos below won't make the final version of the book. Here they are anyway.

All images copyright Matt Salusbury, cover image copyright Matt Salusbury, drawing based on a photo copyright Sali Palode, used with his permission



Dionthere skull



Reconstruction of a stegodon (relative of an elephant) - approx 3.7 metres at the shoulder in life

Phiomia (skull, left at the top and reconstruction, right at the top) and Gomphotherium (skull immediately above, reconstruction right).

The description of M. Le Petit's "water elephant" - an alleged pygmy elephant which Le Petit claims to have seen in 1910 along the Temba-Mayi River in 'the Congo' has uncanny similarities to two very ancient prehistoric elephant ancestors - Phiomia and Gomphoterium. Both had an elongated head and a short trunk. However, they would need to have survived not just a few million years but tens of millions of years to still be around in the early twentieth century Congo. And while Phiomia was found in Egypt, Gomphoterium was a continent away in North America. And they both had distinctive and visible tusks in their lower jaws, which Le Petit doesn't mention. Phiomia was 1.4 metres tall, Gomphoterium was over two metres. Shown are scale models and their skulls. You'll have to read Pygmy Elephants for more on M. Le Petit's water elephants.

Adult bull Asian elephant on the left, adult bull African elephant on the right, with male African elephant calf, showing their sizes for comparison.

Proofreading is coming along nicely

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