Class: MAMMALIA

Order: PROBOSCIDEA

Family: ELEPHANTIDAE

For years, it was believed that only two elephant species existed, until the Forest Elephant was described as its own species in 2000. African and Asian Elephants are not typically capable of hybridisation - the only known hybrid, an elephant named 'Motty', lived only for 10 or so days after birth.

This order of mammals contains the largest land-animals on Earth. There are three known living species of Elephants - The genus Elephas contains the one species of Asian Elephant, which once occurred throughout much of Asia and also some of Asia Minor, though today this range is much fragmented. The genus Loxodonta contains the two species of African Elephant - one of which lives on open savannah, the other, smaller species living in forest. In all, the Asian Elephant is dwarfed by both African species.

The fossil record gives a satisfactory record as to how the elephant probably evolved over some 40 or so million years. 37 million years ago, the stubby, short-snouted Moeritherium appeared, built for a life feeding on aquatic plants in the forest. Its branch is not thought to be directly ancestral to elephants, though Moeritherium would have been a close relative of the ancestral elephant. Later on, the lower jaw of these animals would grow greatly in size, as to help brush off vegetation. The deinotheres, which appeared later, had comparatively shorter jaws, like today's elephants. This may be because the deinotheres also had a more specialised trunk, as the leaves they had been feeding on were beginning to lose nutritional value, so a trunk would be useful to cram as much plant food in as possible. Larger elephants may have been selected by nature, as they were better at getting more food, protecting themselves, and storing the food. Elephants would diversify into a number of different genera - Elephants of the Northern Hemisphere would grow a thick layer of fur, leading to the mammoths - a lineage that lasted some 6 million years before a rapid extinction, perhaps caused by a lack of sustainable plant food after the end of the last Ice Age. On some islands, where elephants reached, they would, over millions of years, become greatly smaller in size, as for a lack of resources. The last dwarf-elephant died out some 10,000 years ago, for reasons unclear.