Dwarf Elephant - Mediterranean Islands

Mediterranean Islands

Dwarf elephants first inhabited the Mediterranean islands during the Pleistocene, including all the major islands with the apparent exception of Corsica and the Balearics. Mediterranean dwarf elephants have generally been considered as members of the genus paleoloxodontine, derived from the continental Straight-tusked Elephant, Elephas (Palaeoloxodon) antiquus Falconer & Cautley, 1847. An exception is the dwarf Sardinian Mammoth, Mammuthus lamarmorae (Major, 1883), the only endemic elephant of the Mediterranean islands belonging to the mammoth line. A genetic study published in 2006 theorized that the Elephas creticus could be from the mammoth line too. A scientific study of 2007 demonstrates the mistakes of the DNA research of 2006.

During low sea levels, the Mediterranean islands were colonised again and again, giving rise, sometimes on the same island, to several species (or subspecies) of different body sizes. The island of Sicily appears to have been colonised by proboscideans in at least three separate waves of colonisation. These endemic dwarf elephants were taxonomically different on each island or group of very close islands, like the Cyclades archipelago.

There are many uncertainties about the time of colonisation, the phylogenetic relationships and the taxonomic status of dwarf elephants on the Mediterranean islands. Extinction of the insular dwarf elephants has not been correlated with the arrival in the islands of man. Furthermore, it has been suggested by the paleontologist Othenio Abel in 1914, that the finding of skeletons of such elephants sparked the idea that they belonged to giant cyclopses, because the center nasal opening was thought to be a cyclopic eye socket.