Observation Of Elephants

Elephants are gentle giants that primarily live in Africa. They have a long line of how they became what they are today. The elephants may be very large animals but they are huge prey for big game hunters. There is a lot to tell from where they begin to where they are now. Most experts believe that the Mammoth which have been extinct is an early form of the elephant. Experts believe that what we have on Earth now are direct decedents of them and that many of the changes including the loss of the thick hair occurred during the evolution process. When we think of elephants we tend to think of very large animals. But however, they have found that suggest that in the prehistoric period some of the species were the size

Two distinct clades seem to have formed 6 million years ago. The first clade included the hypothetical ancestor of savanna and forest elephants. The two seem to have diverged sometime during the miocene-pliocene transition 5 million years ago. The second clade includes Asian elephant and the now extinct woolly mammoth. It is important to note that these two diverged from their common clade later than savanna and forest elephants diverged from theirs, making them genetically closer to each other than the two species of Loxodonta. Africa has been shown to be the cradle of all elephantid species (3). Asian elephants then migrated to Asia and the African savannah elephant began to dominate the expanding grasslands of East Africa. Forest elephants followed their independent evolutionary path in the dense Central African forests. Important differences between the forest and savannah habitats, in particular the abundance of grasses and relatively lower abundance of fruits and trees in the savannah, resulted in very different diets for the two species. In addition, savannah elephants now faced large, group-hunting predators (lions and hyenas), as well as seasonal shortages of open water, which together might explain some of the differences in the social system between savannah and forest