Dwarf elephants on Pleistocene Islands: a natural experiment in Parallel Evolution
a. Adult dwarf elephant tibia (P. falconeri, Sicily) in my hand. b. Femur of P. antiquus (ancestor of P. falconeri) next to Hans Pohlig. Taken from Osbourne 1942.
a.
Fossil ‘dwarf’ elephants are found on islands throughout the Mediterranean, dating from 800,000 to 11,000 years ago. They represent some of the most dramatic examples of island dwarfism, with the smallest dwarf elephants estimated to have a body mass of 150 kg, compared to a putative 10,000 kg ancestor. Despite continued interest over the last 150 years, Mediterranean dwarf elephants remain little understood. Key questions remain unanswered – what is the nature of dwarfing in these elephants? What factors contribute to dwarfing, and why have populations on different islands - or the same island at a different point in time – achieved differing body sizes? Furthermore, the mainland ancestry of the earliest Sicilian/Maltese dwarf elephant (P. falconeri) has been recently called into question, and it has been suggested that they could represent a mammoth – rather than palaeoloxodontid – lineage.
My Ph.D. aims to address these questions. Supervised by Prof. Adrian Lister (UCL) and Dr. John Hutchinson (RVC), I utilize metric methods and comparative anatomy to investigate the evolution and adaptation of these dwarf elephants. My work focuses on dwarf elephants from Sicily, Malta, Crete, Cyprus and Tilos and full size elephants from the European mainland. Extant African and Asian elephants are used for comparative anatomy, and to investigate elephant biomechanics and locomotion (with John Hutchinson and Charlotte Miller)
above: P. falconeri skeleton
below: investigating extant ele locomotion
