Discovered, a third kind of elephant

AS everyone knows, there are two species of elephant – the Asian and the African.

Unfortunately, it turns out that everyone was wrong, scientists announced yesterday.

DNA testing has revealed that there are two species of African elephant, the Forest and the Savannah, which have remained genetically isolated.

They split two to five million years ago, and their genes have not mingled for more than 500,000 years.

It provides ‘compelling evidence for their definition as separate species’, the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said.

Savannah elephants weigh six tons and are paler than Forest ones, which are half as much.

Scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Adelaide University tested elephants and tissue from extinct mammoths and mastodons to create a family tree.