#elephantoidea

[alphynix]

Island Weirdness #31 -- Tiny Elephants On Parade Part 2: Flores

Much like Japan, ancient Flores had a succession of dwarf stegodontids -- close relatives of modern elephants that were capable of island-hopping through Indonesia by swimming.

Stegodon sondaari lived on Flores during the Early Pleistocene, about 900,000 years ago, and was the size of  a small water buffalo at just 1.2m (3′11″) tall at the shoulder. It was probably descended from the larger Stegodon trigonocephalus, known from Java, and it had proportionally short legs which may have been an adaptation to clambering over rough terrain and steep inclines.

Around 850,000 years ago Stegodon sondaari disappeared from Flores, probably due to a large volcanic eruption, but a new wave of stegodontids quickly recolonized the island. The mid-sized Stegodon florensis probably originated from either Java to the west or Sulawesi to the north, and eventually evolved into a new dwarfed subspecies.

Stegodon florensis insularis wasn’t quite as small as its predecessor, standing around 1.8m tall (5′10″). It probably didn’t shrink quite so much due to the existing presence of various predators on Flores, since it was likely the main prey of large Komodo dragons, it was hunted by Homo floresiensis, and it may also have been occasionally targeted by giant storks.

It seems to have disappeared around the same time as several other unique endemic species, between 50,000 and 20,000 years ago, due to either climate change, another volcanic eruption, or the arrival of modern humans -- or perhaps a combination of all of those factors.

And that’s all for this month... but Island Weirdness will be back later for part 2, with more giants, more dwarfs, and so many elephants.

[animalids]

African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana)

Photo by Mark Bridger

[alphynix]

Island Weirdness #13 -- Tiny Elephants On Parade Part 1: Japan

Part of the “island rule” is that large animals often become smaller -- and no group seems to exemplify this more than the elephants.

Although they’re the largest living land animals today, and in the past included some of the largest known land mammals ever, ancient elephants also frequently ended up on islands thanks to their ability to swim long distances. They produced many different dwarfed forms around much of the world, and a few of them will be featured intermittently throughout both months of this theme.

The earliest known examples were the stegodontids of Japan in the early Miocene. These animals weren’t quite true elephants, instead being close evolutionary cousins to them, and had two small additional tusks in their lower jaws similar to the related gomphotheres.

Stegolophodon pseudolatidens first arrived in Japan about 18 million years ago, and within just 2 million years they’d developed into insular dwarfs that were probably around 2m tall at the shoulder (6′6″) -- still reasonably large, but only about 60% the size of their mainland relatives.

Much later in the Early Pleistocene another small almost-elephant appeared in Japan. Living between about 2 million years ago and 700,000 years ago, Stegodon aurorae was about the same size as the then-extinct Stegolophodon but probably wasn’t descended from them. Instead it was probably the result of a separate arrival and dwarfing of a larger Stegodon species from mainland Asia.

[1vv4]

#東山動植物園 #東山動物園 #象 #elephant #Elephantoidea #アジアゾウ #ミニチュア #miniature #ガチャガチャ #カプセルトイ #ガシャポン #Gachagacha #Gasha #plastic #capsuletoy #toy #日本 #Japan #東京 #Tokyo #ivvaDOTinfo #ivva (上野駅) https://www.instagram.com/p/CazuuoCv4AF/?utm_medium=tumblr

[gabrielli430-blog]

《Angryphant》#deity #proboscidea #elephantoidea New species being found in southeast continent. Ferocious, body surrounded by fire, rampage. All visible cases are close to human arable land. Mutation maybe caused by human cropper.《火爆象》#神界 #長鼻目 #象科 被發現於東南大陸的全新種。性情凶暴，全身冒火，橫衝直撞。所有目擊個案均出現在人類耕地附近。不排除受人類作物影響引至突變。 https://www.instagram.com/p/BwMl-veHWce/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=j0tef6dpf7lx

[dendroica]

African Elephant Population Dropped 30 Percent in 7 Years - The New York Times

The African elephant population is in drastic decline, having shrunk about 30 percent from 2007 to 2014, according to a survey published this week.

The deterioration is accelerating: Largely because of poaching, the population is dropping 8 percent a year, according to the Great Elephant Census, which was released on Wednesday.

The census results are the culmination of a $7 million undertaking financed by the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who committed in 2010 to giving away half of his wealth, estimated at $18.6 billion this year, according to Forbes magazine.

“The findings of the Great Elephant Census show clearly that poaching is still decimating elephant herds across Africa,” Ibrahim Thiaw, the deputy executive director for the United Nations Environment Program, said about the survey. “This practice makes no sense on any level — moral, economic or political.”

Starting in early 2014, teams of researchers fanned out across Africa in several dozen airplanes covering nearly 290,000 miles in a quest to sample the continent’s elephant population. They counted about 352,000 savanna elephants along the way, accounting for 93 percent of all those remaining in the 18 countries surveyed. More than half live in Botswana and Zimbabwe.

The researchers also counted elephant carcasses, finding an estimated 12 for every 100 living elephants — an unsustainable level — suggesting that the continent’s population is in decline. The count was compared with historical data to estimate the change since 2007, a turning point for the elephant population, which had grown over the previous dozen years.