Mammoths: Ice Age Giants at the Natural History Museum

First thing this morning I was at the press preview for "Mammoths: Ice Age Giants", which opens tomorrow at the Natural History Museum (NHM) London.

I regret I've got no photos. When I got there I found my camera was somehow damaged and wouldn't focus, there was a rather pathetic buzzing noise when I switched it on. The photos I took with it came out very blurry, so you'll have to rely on my written description of the event.

And I only had the opportunity to say briefly say hello to, and shake hands with Prof. Adrian Lister, the NHM's expert on mammoths, as he had a lot of interviews lined up, including one with a Japanese TV crew. Prof. Lister, along with Dr. Victoria Herridge, who was also at the launch, helped me out with contributions to Pygmy Elephants.

Lister said we are just at the beginning with DNA studies of mammoths, although we've already used DNA it to establish their hair was not red (frozen mammoths are often unearthed with red hair) but dark brown. The red is the result of decay over the years.

Global warming played a big part in the mammoth's demise, according to Lister, and led to retreating grasslands and encroaching forests. with human agency towards the end also being a factor. Mammoths moved into the same areas as humans at about the same time, as the environment opened up the same "pathways" for them to travel - out of Africa, into Eurasia and across the Bering Straits into the New World. We don't know for certain whether the many "mammoth products" used by early humans were hunted or scavenged.

Lister also said that the current global warming we're experiencing means the permafrosts melt for longer, resulting in more mammoth discoveries in recent years than in the 200 years since the first recorded discovery in 1799. Another factor in the sharp rise in mammoth discoveries is "locals twigging that people are interested", as Lister put it, meaning that the peoples of Siberia are looking out for mammoth remains more, and reporting them when they find them. There remain an awful lot of mammoth tusks to be found in the soil of Siberia, he added.

In response to a question, Lister said of the legal trade in mammoth ivory that there's a debate about its ethics, and whether by satisfying demand it saves elephants, or by keeping ivory carving going it fuels the demand for the illegal ivory trade. Mammoth ivory is currently "not covered by CITES" as they're extinct, not endangered anymore.

There's a full-size Columbian mammoth replica in the exhibition, not much bigger than the biggest African elephants, with thin fuzzy hair only along its back and the top of its head. There's a Mammathus exilis pygmy elephant reconstruction (M. exilis lived on Santa Rosa island, off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.) The full-size M. exilis model has a long narrow skull and a domed head, and no fur, and surprisingly short tusks. It's about my height (6ft 3). Behind the M. exilis model there's a nice mural of M. exilis on the Santa Rosa beach, with elephant seals (about the same size) and pelicans.There are Mammathus creticus bits on display along with other Cretan microfauna. M. creticus was for over a century known as Elephas creticus, until Dr Herridge's research discovered it was in fact not a pygmy elephant but a pygmy mammoth - and one of the smallest, not much more than three feet high. Wisely, there no reconstructions beyond a painting at this stage.

There's a "bring me the head of a probiscidean" exhibit with the massive disembodied heads of some of the earlier elephant relatives, and you're allowed to touch them. The deinotherium has a huge thick short trunk and relatively tiny, and all the proto-elephant proboscideans have not much tusk showing beyond the gum.

And there were lots of lovely interative displays, and the extraordinarily preserved baby mammoth Lubyna was impressive, particularly the "brown fat" lump behind the back of her head, used to regulate body temperature.

The bronze miniatures of different elephants had the Columbian mammoth at around African savannah elephant size, and the woolly smaller, and the American mastodon I thought very elelphant-like, barely distinguishable from an elephant.

There was also a full-size in situ half buried mammoth skeleton sticking out of some earth, it was unclear whether it was real or a cast. There wasn't much wolliness in evidence, and the audio emphasised they weren't just woolly, they lived on four continents and across a range of climates.

The NHM shop (its Gift Shop and online shop) is currently without a 'retail buyer', they asked me to drop off a sample copy of Pygmy Elephants for their 'retail guy' to look at, and they will get back to me in the event they're interested in stocking it.

Report on a couple of Pygmy Elephants book launch events, and a vaguely related new project

The London launch for Pygmy Elephants on 13 March at the Big Green Bookshop was a big success, with thirty people dropping in during the course of the evening, and yes, I did shift some copies. Everyone who bought a copy got a little drawing of an Elephas falconeri skeleton from me on the title page, after I was desperately practising these at work earlier that day.

A proper palaeontologist turned up – Dr Darren Naish, of Scientific American's popular Tet Zo blog all the way from the University of Southampton, was in da house, with one of the London-based "@TetZoo possee", John Conway, paleoartist. I've since got wind of a Tet Zoo Con event upcoming. See here for the background to the Poundland komodo dragon model I ended up giving him on the night.

Also putting in an appearance was Oliver Simmonds, who I knew as Olly Simmonds at school back in the early 1980s, and who told me he has a new book on the way, after an absence of his name from bookshop shelves of a couple of decades – he wrote Delirium just after leaving university. And Rosanne Rabinowitz, author of Helen's Story - she's a character out of occultist Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan. Most of the NUJ London Freelance Branch committee were in evidence, and events were considerably enlivened shortly after-kick off by one of our number accidentally breaking a bottle of white wine. It turned out the Big Green's assistant behind the counter that night is in LFB too.

A former colleague from my English language teaching days back in the early Noughties attended, and Rosie from London Cryptzoology Club. There were even a couple of old enemies who seemed to be getting on well. We had apologies from Prof. Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum's Palentology Dept, who has a regular adult education gig in Finchley on Thursdays.

Darren had heard the legend about Jumbo the elephant laying down his life to save the Tom Thumb elephant from that oncoming freight train at that marshalling yard on St John's Ontario in September 1885 – and I was able to confirm that it was just a that, a legend – possibly the sort of tall tale PT Barnum liked to make up for publicity purposes. Darren was also able to clear up the possible confusion between gaur (Indian bison) and water buffalo. I showed a slide of a herd of wild cattle thundering past in Neyyar Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary, reputed habitat of the kallana pygmy elephant of Kerala. Tracker Mallan Kani said they were gaur, but Mr
A. Marriott Hyde in a letter to Fortean Times cast doubt on Mallan's identification saying my photo showed water buffalo. Nope, said tetrapod zoologist Darren, they were most definitely gaur.



Definitely gaur, not water buffalo, apparently. Photo: copyright Matt Salusbury

The book reading at Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel on Saturday 5 April was an altogether more surreal affair. None of my so-called friends who said they were coming turned up in the end, including some people who promised to come to the March Big Green event and didn't come to that either!

In the event, I ended up reading aloud extracts of Pygmy Elephants to a small audience mostly of Green and Black Cross legal support people (there were at Freedom there giving back-office phone support for arrestees at a Occupy anniversary demo in Trafalgar Square that day. In the event the plan to "Occupy Trafalgar Square" unsurprisingly didn't get off the ground, so they didn't have much to do.) One of their number was a trainee lawyer up from Liverpool, where she worked with one of the Hillsborough support groups.

One of the trainee lawyers said she laughed so much she was crying, but this was nothing to do with Pygmy Elephants, which wasn't written to be funny, but down to the hand signals that Freedom's manager "Legal Andy" was making behind my back while I was reading. His hand movements mostly involved miming the actions of the elephant I was describing, by sticking his forearm up against his nose and waving it in the air as if were a trunk.

We had one of the most impressive apologies I've heard for not attending, from Dr Victoria Herridge of the Natural History Museum, who had suddenly got a gig hunting for mammoth bones in Siberia, and who therefore at short notice had to be out of town. Prof Adrian Lister's apology due to an imminent journey abroad may well have been the same gig.

There will be a "Devon launch" of Pygmy Elephants sometime during the weekend of 15 and 16 August at Weird Weekend. I am one of the speakers, giving a talk on a subject I stumbled across while writing Pygmy Elephants – a bizarrely straight tusk of a mystery animal found in the ivory markets of Addis Ababa by Baron Maurice de Rothschild and his team during his East African expedition in 1907. While most cryptozoology today attracts zero funding and is the preserve of the perpetually skint, this was an example of very well-resourced cryptozoology where money was no object. (Maurice seems to have lost interest after his one East African expedition, in his twenties, and gone into horseracing and art collecting instead.)

His associate Henri Neuville wrote it up a fifty-page study of the "enigmatic tooth" (they weren't even sure if it was a tusk) a few years later.



Front cover for the purposes of a review or critique (Copyright Act 1988)

Neuville concluded that the grain of the tusk under a microscope didn't look like that of the tusk of any known animal that had tusks, it wasn't fossilized, nor did it look like any of the "anomalous" deformed tusks of elephants or hippoes that had been collected by museums over the years. You'll have to go to the talk for more.

Lo Lo, a dwarf black elephant in Philadelphia

Thanks again to Richard Muirhead who found this reference to "dwarf black elephants" from one of his many trawls of online newspaper archives. He apologises for neglecting to note the date or newspaper. (Please contact me if I've inadvertently reproduced your copyrighted material, although since the article's from 1910 at the very latest, the copyright's likely to have inspired.). The reference to the Ninth and Arch Museum (Philadelphia) would put it between 1885 and 1910. The Ninth and Arch hosted numerous freak show attractions, the most famous them being John William Coffey, the "Skeleton Dude," the most famous of many Skeleton Men carnival acts.

The article refers to yet another gigantic elephant and dwarf elephant double act - Kedah the giant white elephant (said to be from Siam - Thailand - but most unlikely, as white elephants were meant to be presented to the King of Thailand) and Lo Lo, the "dwarf black elephant". Pygmy Elephants describes two more giant and dwarf elephant act - the very famous Jumbo and Tom Thumb of PT Barnum's circus, and Campbell's Zoological and Equestrian Institute in 1863 had a large African elephant and a small, dark Indian elephant, judging by one of the Institute's posters.

All the giant and "dwarf" or "pygmy" elephant circus double acts seem to have been an adult and an infant.

Anarcho-cred with the CFZ

Anarchist cred for the CFZ. I should in fairness point out that as well as its affiliation, Freedom Bookshop that is hosting the Pygmy Elephants event is round the corner from my regular place of work.

Pygmy Elephants book event this Saturday (5 April)

It's all here, including a "pub afterwards" update - scroll to the end. See Twitter for any last-minute additional info or faintly humorous comments on it. Freedom Bookshop will be serving DRINK for donations.

Dale Drinnon's Frontiers of Zoology blog on Pygmy Elephants

"On a fascinating subject that has gathered much controversy and yet very little comprehensive coverage in the literature" - Dale Drinnon's influential Frontiers of Zoology blog on "Pygmy Elephants".

Gimpy the pygmy elephant at Cincinnati Zoo

(Front cover image for the purposes of a critique or review, Copyright Act 1988)

There appears to have been a pygmy elephant, or an elephant described as such, at Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens in the 1930s. (Cincinnati, Ohio, in the US.) Their name (gender not given in the extracts I saw) was "Gimpy" and there are three references to "Gimpy the pygmy elephant" in the book The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens by Joy W. Kraft (20101), part of the Images of America series. I am investigating further.

Meanwhile, a quick round-up of the pygmy elephants in zoos described in Pygmy Elephants. Bernard Heuvelmans mentions that pygmy elephants were said to live in Antwerp Zoo, although I haven't found any references to this in the online catalogue of Antwerp's Felix Archive, which now has the digitised catalogue of the Antwerp Zoo papers. Bronx Zoo had "Congo the elephant", the type specimen of the alleged pygmy elephant species Loxodonta pumilio, whose remains are now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, clearly labelled as that of a forest elephant (Specimen No. M-35591 in the Museum's accession log.) There was at least one other "pygmy elephant" at Bronx Zoo, a female known as "Tiny", who may or may not have been the same animal as the pygmy elephant "Josephine".

In 1923, according to the Wellington, New Zealand, Evening Post (quoting the London Daily Mail), there was said to be a young pygmy elephant being looked after on behalf of a private owner in London Zoo. But then you should't ever believe anything you read in the Daily Mail. And you'll have to read Pygmy Elephants for more information on the two "pygmy elephants" said by a German vet to be living in Tacoma Zoo, the private zoo of the President of Liberia, in the 1970s.