Big ears. Trunks. Wrinkly, grey skin. Ask a five-year-old to draw an elephant and you’ll get much the same cartoon. But look a little closer, and you’ll discover that the species are exquisitely different.
Zoologists originally thought that there were two living species of elephant. African elephants, the larger of the two, live in Africa, whilst Asian elephants, fittingly, live in Asia. So they thought.
Alarm bells started to ring when naturalists clocked that African elephants living in forests looked a bit different from African elephants living in open savannah. Then in 2001, scientists analysed their DNA and found forest and savannah elephants were genetically distinct enough to be classed as separate species.
So now there are three living species of elephant. African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) roam the open bush and scrublands of sub-Saharan Africa. African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) inhabit the dense tropical forests of Central and West Africa. Meanwhile Asian elephants live in South and Southeast Asia where they inhabit in tropical and subtropical forests and grasslands.
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All three species are related but perhaps not as closely as you’d think. Asian elephants are more closely related to woolly mammoths than they are to African elephants. And African forest elephants are more closely related to an extinct elephant called Palaeoloxodon antiquus than they are to African savannah elephants.
Given this evolutionary distance, and the fact that they occupy very different environments, you’d expect these species to have evolved physical differences. Look closely, and you see they do.
African savannah elephants are the biggest. Adult males stand up to 3 metres high and weigh up to 6,000 kg – about the same as a forklift truck. Asian elephants are smaller, and African forest elephants smaller still.
African elephants have bigger ears than their Asian cousins, which help them to stay cool by radiating heat. African savannah elephants have ears shaped a bit like the continent of Africa, while Asian elephants have ears shaped more like India. The ears of African forest elephants are more oval shaped.
African elephants have a flat, domed head and a trunk that ends in two ‘fingers.’ Asian elephants have a twin-domed head with an indent in the middle, and a trunk that ends in one finger.
Their tusks are different too. Both male and female African elephants can have the modified incisors, but the tusks of savannah elephants curve outwards, while those of forest elephants are generally straighter and point downwards. Some, but not all Asian elephant bulls grow upward-curving tusks, while some Asian elephant cows have small, peg-like tusks called tushes.
Other differences include the number of toes, the shape of the back and the texture of the skin. But there is one poignant similarity: all three species are endangered. According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are around 350,000 African savannah elephants, 135,000 African forest elephants and fewer than 50,000 Asian elephants.
All three species face major threats, including habitat loss, conflict with people and poaching for ivory. For all their differences, the thing they have most in common is that they need our protection
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