Species Of Elephants
How Many Species Of Elephants Are There?
The number of different species of elephants depends somewhat on the source of information you're looking at. For a long time, it was commonly believed that there were two different species of elephants, the African elephant, and the Asian elephant, also called the Indian elephant. It was eventually established that there were actually two subspecies of the African elephant, and four subspecies of the Asian elephant in existence.
It was next determined that the two subspecies of African element, the Savannah elephant and the Forest Elephant, were in truth, two totally distinct and separate species. So, for many years after, conventional wisdom was, that we had three species, two from Africa and one from Asia, with the latter consisting of four subspecies.
Then, a pygmy elephant was discovered in Africa, leading to the possibility of a yet another species being added to the list. Things became a little confusing, as one of the Asian subspecies, the Borneo elephant, was called the Pygmy elephant as well. Nevertheless, the name stuck. The African Pygmy elephant however, was eventually found to be a subspecies of the Forest elephant. So, now we had two subspecies of pygmy elephants, one in Africa and one in Asia. By the way, when you hear the term pygmy elephant, you might think of it as being a cute little animal, about the size of a miniature horse. A pygmy elephant is indeed a much smaller elephant, but still an elephant, and a little too big for a house pet.
Just when things seemed to have settled down, as far as the number of different species of elephants was concerned, genetic studies determined that the Borneo elephant, thought to be one of the four subspecies of the Asian elephant, was actually a distinct species, and not an Asian elephant at all. It is an endangered species, with between 1,000 and 1,500 existing today.
So, just where do we stand? The answer is, we have two species of African elephants, the Savannah elephant and the Forest elephant, plus a subspecies of the Forest elephant, the African Pygmy elephant. African elephants have never been domesticated as has been the case with some of their Asian cousins. The Savannah elephant is the species most often seen in our zoos. Then there is the third species, the Asian elephant, made up of three subspecies, the Indian elephant, the Sumatran elephant, and the Sri Lankan elephant. In addition we now have a fourth species, the Borneo elephant.
The Sri Lankan elephant, the largest of these, is wild, and a forest dweller. The Sumatran and Indian elephants exist in both wild and domesticated states, with the Indian elephant being by far the most numerous. The best known of the extinct species of elephants is the Woolly Mammoth, which lived up until about 10,000 years ago. The Woolly Mammoth is in fact, the only known extinct true elephant. Other elephant-like creatures, such as the Mastodon, have been found to be separate species, and not true members of the elephant family.
If all of this is confusing, just remember that there are two species of African elephants, three subspecies of Asian elephants, plus the Borneo Pygmy species. To keep it even simpler, let's just say we have elephants in Africa, and elephants in Asia, and they are not all the same elephant.