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A female African bush elephant skeleton on display at the Museum of Osteology, Oklahoma City. The first scientific description of the African elephant was written in 1797 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who proposed the scientific name Elephas africanus. [3] Loxodonte was proposed as a generic name for the African elephant by Frédéric Cuvier in
Many stories tell of isolated young elephants returning to or finding a family, such as "The Elephant's Child" from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Disney's Dumbo, and Kathryn and Byron Jackson's The Saggy Baggy Elephant. Other elephant heroes given human qualities include Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, David McKee's Elmer, and Dr. Seuss's Horton ...
The earliest members of the modern genera of Elephantidae appeared during the latest Miocene–early Pliocene around 5 million years ago. The elephantid genera Elephas (which includes the living Asian elephant) and Mammuthus (mammoths) migrated out of Africa during the late Pliocene, around 3.6 to 3.2 million years ago. [17]
The scientific name Elephas was proposed by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 who described the genus and an elephant from Ceylon. [12] The genus is assigned to the proboscidean family Elephantidae and is made up of one living and seven extinct species: [13] Elephas maximus – Asian elephant [1] Elephas maximus indicus – Indian elephant
Both African elephant species are threatened foremost by habitat loss and habitat fragmentation following conversion of forests for plantations of non-timber crops, livestock farming, and building urban and industrial areas. As a result, human-elephant conflict has increased.
Elephant brains are structured similarly to human brains, which means they are capable of a wide variety of intellectual abilities, including memory, grief, mimicry, art, playing, using tools ...
The African bush elephant inhabits a variety of habitats such as forests, grasslands, woodlands, wetlands and agricultural land. It is a mixed herbivore feeding mostly on grasses, creepers, herbs, leaves, and bark. The average adult consumes about 150 kg (330 lb) of vegetation and 230 L (51 imp gal; 61 US gal) of water each day.
The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), also known as the Asiatic elephant, is a species of elephant distributed throughout the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, from India in the west to Borneo in the east, and Nepal in the north to Sumatra in the south. Three subspecies are recognised—E. m. maximus, E. m. indicus and E. m. sumatranus.