Instead of one species of elephant, Africa has two, researchers said on Tuesday, confirming suspicions about the two distinctly different looking pachyderms.
Using gene sequencing tools, teams from Harvard, the University of Illinois and the University of York in Britain have shown that instead of being the same species — as
scientists have long believed — the African savanna elephant and the smaller African forest elephant are distant cousins, having been largely separated for 2 million to 7 million years.
“What our study suggests is forest and savanna elephants are very distantly related to each other and not just subspecies or populations of the same species,” said Alfred Roca of the University of Illinois. “The surprising finding is that forest and savanna elephants from Africa — which some have argued are the same species — are as distinct from each other as Asian elephants and mammoths,” said David Reich of Harvard Medical School. —Reuters