Hey zoologists, students and teachers, please update your knowledge about African elephants. There are two species of African elephants.
Last Tuesday, the researchers announced that there are two distinct species of elephants in Africa. This is confirmed on the basis of their DNA sequences hence they are totally different pachyderms.
Harvard University based in Illinois and the University of York in Britain has announced that the two species i.e. The African Savanna Elephants and The African Forest elephants are two distinct cousins of each other. It is surprising to know that these two species got separated from each other 2 to 7 million years ago.
In Our school and colleges, we used to teach and learn that the African elephants are from only just a single species but that’s not the real case.
Alfred Roca (lead researcher of Harvard University) said that these two different species are not the subspecies of each other, in fact they are totally different form each other.
The gene sequences of these elephant species and the Asian elephants were compared to the extinct species of elephants i.e. Mammoths and American mastodon. And on the basis of the comparison, the scientists said that these two African species are as different as the mammoth and the Asian elephants.
If we talk about the sizes of these two species of Elephants, the African Savanna elephant is double the size of African Forest elephant. The scientists are predicting that these two species of elephants would have come from the same species. (As a matter of fact everything has an origin like we [humans] and apes.)
But on contrary some professors are not agreeing to the origin of these species. Some claim that these two species are not from same origin but they are totally different because the gene sequences have shown the presence of the characters of Asian elephants and mammoths which are totally different from each other.
One thing about which every researcher is happy that, we would be able to get to know about the exact time period in which the mammoths and elephants separated from each other!
The Harvard researcher Alfred Roca said that for the last 50 years, we were treating the African elephants as single species but now the scenario has changed.
I AM THINKING NOW AFTER SOME YEARS TEACHER WILL BE TEACHING US, AS THERE ARE 3 SPECIES OF ELEPHANTS
1. ASIAN
2. AFRICAN SAVANNA
3.AFRICAN FOREST.
AMAZING……
