Elephant Story  

The ancestors of elephants, mammoths, and mastodons were pig-sized animals with tapir-like upper lips that lived about 55 million years ago. As these creatures evolved, their heads became smaller, their upper lips became longer and more flexible, and eventually became trunks.  

In the past, more than 250 species of elephants and elephant-like creatures roam the globe. Elephant ancestors include "Moeritherum" (a pig-like animal that lived 40  to 30 million years ago) and "Piomia" (a long-nosed pig-like animal  that lived 37  to 28 million years ago). , "Deinotherium" (an elephant-like animal with downward fangs that lived 2 to 1.8 million years ago), "Primelefas" (an animal that looks like a modern elephant and lived  6.2  to 5 million years ago).  

African elephants and Asian elephants shared a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. They lived at the same time as the American Mastodon (lived 3.75 million to 11,500 years ago) and the wool mammoth (lived 400,000 to 3,900 years ago). Elephant ancestors such as mastodons and mammoths have been found on all  continents except Antarctica and Australia. In 2009, a huge, well-preserved 200,000-year-old prehistoric elephant skeleton was discovered on Java. This is unusual given that bones usually break down rapidly in humid tropical climates. The animals were 4 meters tall and weighed more than 10 tons,  closer to the size of a  mammoth than  modern Asian elephants. Another Indonesian, Flores, was Stegodon's hometown — an ancestor of an extinct elephant that is about one-tenth the size of a cow, or about one-tenth the size of an Asian elephant. The  

Asian elephant once spread west to the Tigris and Euphrates regions of Syria and Iraq, and  north to Manchuria, China. Based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, there are two major strains of Asian elephants that split  about 3 million years ago. Most belong to the "alpha" line. People in Malaysia Peninsula, Sumatra and Borneo belong to the "Beta" lineage. For unknown reasons, both strains occur in Sri Lanka. Distribution and number of Asian elephants  

Asian elephants exist in 13 countries  WWF has only 34,000-51,000 Asian elephants worldwide, including 12,000-16,000 animals that are bred in Asia or  in zoos around the world. I presume. In contrast, there are an estimated 550,000 elephants in Africa today (2003).  

Adult male African elephants can weigh up to 6 tons, shoulder heights up to 11 feet, and females up to 4 tons. Bush elephants live in most sub-Saharan countries, and forest elephants live in Cameroon, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, and other Central and West African countries. African elephants are more difficult to tame than Asian elephants, but some are trained as circus and tourist mountains in southern Africa.