Tracing ivory from a sixteenth century shipwreck
Geneticists have added a lot of new knowledge about elephant relationships and phylogeography over the last few years. One of the big areas of advance has be...
All posts tagged with elephants
Hybrid origins of the straight-tusked elephants
Elephants are one of the most important comparisons for human origins. Like humans, they’re long-lived animals that have complex social behavior, they requir...
Genomes of straight-tusked elephants
Earlier this month in eLife, Matthias Meyer and colleagues published a cool paper: “Palaeogenomes of Eurasian straight-tusked elephants challenge the current...
Some thoughts on Dorothy Garrod and celebrity fossils
Lydia Pyne’s new book, Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils is a reflection on how fossils become worldwide celebrities. I...
A voice against mammoth cloning
In the UK, a documentary program called “Woolly Mammoth: The Autopsy” has recently run, featuring an international team of scientists involved in a recent ma...
Dan Fisher and the art of elephant preservation
The magazine of the College of Literature, Science and Arts at the University of Michigan has a nice piece profiling Dan Fisher: “The dead elephant in the ro...
Clovis gomphotheres
Guadalupe Sanchez and colleagues reported earlier this month that Clovis artifacts have been found in association with parts of two gomphothere skeletons in ...
A problem of fuzzy mammoths
Paleogenomics is changing the way we study evolution. In a number of cases, it now allows us to study extinct organisms with the same methods as we study liv...