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Ancient genomes suggest Africa has two elephant species

5 January 2011

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Diverging species?

(Image: Peter Blackwell/Nature Picture Library/Rex Features)

THERE may be grounds for doubling the number of African elephant species, according to DNA evidence comparing the genomes of the living elephant species and extinct relatives. The finding backs arguments for conserving savannah and forest elephants separately, rather than treating them as one species.

“The forest elephant is half the size of the savannah elephant and lives in the forest. Their body shape and how they look is quite different,” says David Reich, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard Medical School.

Reich and colleagues compared the DNA of 375 genes for the forest, savannah and Asian elephants, and the extinct woolly mammoth; and also from the extinct mastodon which split from these elephant groups much earlier in their evolutionary history (PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000564). They looked at the differences in the DNA to estimate when each population diverged. “What was really surprising was that the forest elephant and the savannah elephant were as diverged as the Asian elephant and woolly mammoth,” says Reich.

The study suggests that the two African elephants split at least 2.5 million years ago, and possibly much earlier, although Pascal Tassy at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, warns that looking at historical genetic divergence does not give the final word on separating species.

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