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Elephant in a Roman Mosaic
It is World Elephant Day! August 12th is set aside for the contemplation of the greatest land mammal (and maybe the greatest animal overall) the wise, compassionate, beautiful, imperiled elephant. Elephants are my favorite animals! I truly love them so much (admittedly at a distance)…yet I only just got home and I have to get to bed so I cannot write the story I want to tell—of heroic Yao Ming trying to save the world’s elephants. Instead I am going to save that story for a day when I have more time and just do a gallery post of elephant mosaics.
Mosaic elephant from contentinacottage
Elephants in a replica of the Woodchester Pavement
Mosaic Flower Elephant by Diana Jane Designs.
Indian Elephant Mosaic Sculpture
Mosaic Brown Elephant – Mosaik Elefant – Mosaique Elephant – Micro Ceramic Tiles – Craft By Alea Mosaik
Some of these tile artworks of the noble beasts are pretty good, but none of the works really do the great proboscideans full justice. Clearly there are going to have to be more elephant posts before next August! In the meantime, keep talking about elephants and campaigning for them among your friends and peers. A world without elephants would not be a worthwhile place. They are a critical piece of the great mosaic of life!
African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) with calf
Today is World Elephant Day—a one-year old holiday dedicated to the preservation of the world’s two remaining species of proboscideans (a great and ancient order of mammals which over tens of millions of years has included 161 different species that we know of including elephants, mammoths, mastodons, stegodons, deinotheres, moeritheriums, and all sorts of other amazing animals–which we will talk about later). To mark this day and do my part for elephants (which are quickly vanishing from Earth due to insatiable Chinese lust for ivory) , I have spent hours and hours writing the beginnings of various essays about elephant cognition, their importance as a keystone species wherever they live, and their history and attributes.
I have abandoned each of these essays because they have lacked visceral power which I want to bring to the subject of my favorite animal. Instead of providing a laundry list of astonishing things which elephants share with humankind (things like altruism, awareness of death, grieving, knowledge of medicine, tool-use, comprehension of music and the arts, and the ability to mine salt and clay) I have decided to instead present an anecdote about actual elephants which I have taken from Cynthia Moss, a researcher who has spent her life observing elephants and researching their family structure.
Since 1973, Moss has watched the family of one matriarch, Echo, an elephant living in Kenya. The story of Echo’s extended family reads like Russian literature in complexity and richness (although the reading is much sadder since elephants seem to be living through the agonizing death of all their kind). Elephants live human-length lives and have intricate social bonds in their own herds and with the herds they encounter. They bond deeply with their families over the decades they share together and they help each other out even at the risk of death or terrible injury.
One day a group of poachers ambushed Echo’s herd. After killing several elephants outright (including a cow who charged straight into the guns in an attempt to save her calf), the gunmen shot a 13-year old cow named Tina in the lung. Tina’s mother Teresia and her sisters helped her escape, but she was mortally injured. Moss describes Tina’s death in the book “Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family”
[Tina’s] knees started to buckle and she began to go down, but Teresia got on one side of her and Trista on the other and they both leaned in and held her up. Soon, however, she had no strength and she slipped beneath them and fell onto her side. More blood gushed from her mouth and with a shudder she died.
Teresia and Trista became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her…and Tallulah even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it in her mouth. Finally Teresia got around behind her again, knelt down, and worked her tusks in under her shoulder and then, straining with all her strength, she began to lift her. When she got to a standing position with the full weight of Tina’s head and front quarters on her tusk, there was a sharp cracking sound and Teresia dropped the carcass as her right tusk fell to the ground. She had broken it a few inches from the lip and well into the nerve cavity…
Elephant use their tusks for everything (and tusks certainly do not grow back). Just as most people tend to favor one arm, elephants favor one tusk over the other–usually the right. Moss goes on to describe how Teresia and Tina’s sisters spent the night with Tina’s body, tenderly covering their fallen family member with sticks and dirt. In the morning the other elephants reluctantly left, but Teresia was unwilling to depart and kept gently touching her daughter’s body with her foot. Only when the other elephants repeatedly rumbled to her did she finally move on.
You can find the entirety of Moss’ book online here, but be warned, it is tremendously sad—like an elephant version of “The Road” except with more likeable characters.
Elephant Mother & Calf (photo by Douglas Aja)
My favorite mammals are the mighty proboscideans—elephants, mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, moeritheriums, and so on. I have not written about them more because the only proboscideans we know a lot about are the elephants–and elephants are complicated—they are smart and they have human length lives of great social complexity, all of which makes them hard to write about. Additionally elephants are tragic—their populations keep shrinking away as humankind grasps for ever more land and poachers kill the great sentient giants for their ivory. Yet elephants still have a perilous chance to keep on living. What is even sadder than the senseless slaughter of the magnificent elephants are the other proboscideans, which have vanished one by one from earth. Everyone knows about the woolly mammoth and Cuvieronius, the new world gomphothere, but the last non-elephant proboscideans to have died out were even more contemporary.
The stegodons (from the extinct subfamily Stegodontinae) evolved in Southeast Asia approximately eleven and half million years ago. They lived in large swaths of Asia throughout the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs and they survived in Indonesia deep into the Holocene epoch. Radio-carbon dating has dated the last living stegodons to 2,150 BC. The giants died after the pyramids were built at Giza and great cities had begun to sprout up in Mesopotamia and along the Indus valley.
Stegodons looked much like elephants—a resemblance which has caused much taxonomical confusion. Paleontologists once believed elephants descended from stegondons but It seems now that both stegodons and modern elephants descended from Gomphotheriidae (a sister group to the mammoths). Stegodons had different molars and their tusks were so close together that their long trunks draped over the sides. There were many species of stegodons, the largest of which were among the largest of proboscideans, far more immense than today’s two elephant species. The biggest stegodont were 4 m (13 ft) high at the shoulders and had a body length of 8 m (26 ft) which does not even count their 3 meter (10 foot) tusks!
Modern humans reached Southeast Asia 50,000 years ago so we lived in proximity with the stegodons for some time before they vanished. Certain species of stegodons reached isolated Indonesian islands where, over generations, they shrank into dwarf forms. These tiny stegodons were hunted by Homo floresiensis, which seems to have been a dwarf species of human (although the scientific community has not reached consensus concerning the nature of Homo floresiensis). Imagining tiny versions of humans hunting tiny versions of huge elephant-like creatures boggles the mind! I am profoundly sorry the stegodons dwarf, giant, or otherwise could not have held on for a few more millennia. I would love to have seen them—or by 4000 years ago were they already as the Saola is now—ever retreating from a world that did not seem to fit them?
Model of a Moeritherium
Our story takes us back 37 million years ago to the hot moist swamps of the Eocene (again). In the swamps of Africa lived a long low wallowing mammal 3 meters (9.8 feet long) and 70 centimeters (2.25 feet) tall. This swamp dweller occupied the same sort of niche now taken by pygmy hippos and capybaras—it was an amphibious grazer which lived on soft water plants and could slip into the water to avoid land predators (and vice versa). The animal was named Moeritherium, a genus consisting of several similar species, all now long extinct.
Moeritheriums (painting by Heinrich Harder)
Moeritheriums mostly had peg like teeth for grinding up vegetation, but the creatures’ second incisor teeth were elongated like daggers for display, defence, and rooting. So Moeritherium was really another saber toothed creature (like walrus, Smilodon, and Odobenocetops), but we never think of their closest living relatives as saber-toothed so it is hard for me to think of them that way. In fact Moeritherium’s closest relatives overshadow all the details about the low-slung swamp-dwelling creature entirely because they are one of the most magnificent and intelligent orders of creature on planet Earth. The Moeritheriums wallowing in the African swamps long ago were among the very first Proboscideans–an order of mammals including elephants, mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres.
An artist’s conception of a Moeritherium
Moeritheriums probably did not have a long trunk like today’s elephants, but they did have a long flexible upper lip like tapirs. Their eyes and ears were high up on their head so they could submerge themselves but still watch the surrounding landscape. They were not direct ancestors of the elephants and mammoths but instead descended from a common ancestor, Eritherium, a rabbit sized progenitor, which was rather like a hyrax. Moeritheriums were highly successful in their day, but they disappeared as the Eocene climate dyed up and cooled down. Fortunately several other families of proboscideans like the paleomastodons and the Phiomias were there to carry on the magnificent order of Proboscideans.
Paleomastodon (painting by Heinrich Harder)
Yesterday, if you read the post concerning pikas, you probably found yourself wondering why pikas are found throughout the highlands of North America, Europe, and Asia but do not dwell in the rocky scree of Africa and the Middle East. As it turns out, another animal grazes the arid mountain lands in those areas. Although superficially this furry herbivore seems to share many features with the pika, it is a very different sort of creature with an entirely different (and rather grand) history.
A Rock Hyrax near Capetown, South Africa
I’m writing about the hyrax, a tiny tusked grazing creature with certain anachronistic features of earlier mammals (such as an unique dentition and poorly developed internal temperature regulation ). Hyraxes are the only living members of the family Procaviidae, itself the only extant family of the order Hyracoidea. Hyracoids are rare and unusual today, found only in niche ecosystems, but 40 million years ago they were among the dominant grazers in Africa. We’ll get back to the paleontological history of the hyrax family at the end of the article, but for now here’s an overview of the living hyraxes.
Hyraxes (photo by Vladimir Danilov)
Found in rocky and mountainous area of the Sahara and the Middle East, hyraxes are equipped with sweat glands on the tough rubbery pads of their feet. This helps them keep cool and gives them traction on the steep cliffs where they dwell. Additionally they have sophisticated kidneys which help minimize water consumption in their arid rocky homes. Among the small mammals, Hyraxes, uniquely, possess multi-chambered stomachs capable of digesting plant materials and fibers. Their complicated digestive apparatus makes use of numerous symbiotic bacteria to absorb the nutrients out of the coarse shrubs and weeds they eat. Unlike cows and other artiodactyl ruminants, hydraxes do not chew a cud–however their aggressive tusk gnashing was mistaken for cud-chewing by biblical law-givers so um, I guess they are (incorrectly) not kosher according to Deuteronomy.
A Family of Rock Hyraxes (Procavia capensis)
Hyraxes are small animals but they have long lives, elaborate social networks, and surprisingly capacious memories (at least according to zoologists and neurophysiologists). I have watched them at the Bronx zoo where they live in an enclosure filled with baboons and ibexes: it is intriguing to see how their miniature society copes with these large aggressive neighbors. The hyrax colony has all sorts of rules and communication protocols dealing with sentries, foragers, and communal huddling for warmth. Their elaborate social behavior (quite lacking in yesterday’s pikas and tomorrow’s groundhogs) makes sense when one looks at their relatives.
A Painting of Arsinotheriums by Heinrich Harder
As I noted above the Hyracoids were a very diverse and widespread taxonomic order in Africa during the Eocene and Oligocene epochs (55 to 34 million years ago). To quote the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, “the early hyracoids ranged from animals as small as rabbits to ones as large as modern Sumatran rhinoceroses. The fossil skeletons of the early hyracoids indicate that some species were active runners and leapers, while others were heavy, piglike quadrupeds.” In fact these hyracoids, or their immediate ancestors, seem to have been the basal group (which is to say the progenitors) of the paenungulates. DNA sequencing and the fossil record both give compelling evidence for this relationship. This means that the long ago ancestors of the hyraxes–which looked much like today’s hyraxes–were also the grandfather species for the mighty proboscideans—the towering mammoths, the mighty gomphotheres, the mastodons, and the ingenious elephants. Not only that, the early hydracods were also ancestors to the desmostylians, the embrithopods (like the pictured Arsinoitherium), and the gentle sirenians such as dugongs and manatees. When you look at a hyrax you are not looking a tusked groundhog, but at a sophisticated social animal with some giant successful cousins.
A (Proboscidean-centric) Portion of the Paenungulata Clade
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