African elephant in Hintze Hall

Big game hunters provided museums and scientists with animals for study and display. This African elephant, photographed here in 1910, just three years after his arrival, stood proudly in the Museum’s Hintze Hall. The elephant was obtained from the taxidermists Rowland Ward Ltd and was later nicknamed George. The Museum has Asian elephants too, some brought back to London Zoo by Bertie, Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) following his tour of India during 1875-76.

Being able to study similar animals from different continents allowed scientists to compare and contrast the features and evolution of both. These comparisons continue today as Museum scientists, in collaboration with colleagues in the UK, Israel and elsewhere, investigate the evolutionary origin of the Asian elephant. They compare fossils from northern India, Pakistan and the Middle East, many of which are in the Museum collections. Fossils from Bethlehem, excavated in the 1930s, are probably more than three million years old and may represent the earliest record of the Asian elephant lineage outside of Africa, which still retained many features of earlier mammoth. More recent remains, between 500,000 and 200,000 years old, still do not show fully-evolved Asian elephant features, suggesting that the modern species arose later.

Museum scientists and collaborators have also properly defined, for the first time since Linnaeus named the species in 1758, a type specimen (lectotype) for the Asian elephant Elephas maximus from a specimen in the collection.

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