African elephants have new distant cousins — other African elephants.
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A genetic analysis of elephants and their extinct relatives, woolly mammoths and mastodons, shows that forest-dwelling African elephants are a separate species from Africa’s savanna elephants. The research, which appeared December 21 in PLoS Biology, “does a very thorough job of nailing shut the coffin on some of the more heretical theories” about elephant evolution, says Stephen O’Brien, a geneticist who studies genomic diversity at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., and who was not involved in the research.
Forest elephants make up only about a quarter of 500,000 or so of the elephants living in Africa today. Poaching and habitat destruction have caused already endangered populations to dwindle, but the new finding could spur conservation efforts to protect the animals.