three different types of elephants exist on the African continent Using DNA extracted from the dung of wild elephants in Africa, biologists at the University of California, San Diego have determined that three different types of elephants exist on the African continent.
Their discovery, detailed in a paper to be published in the October 7 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, affirms the existence of the well-known savanna elephant and the recently recognized forest elephant of central Africa. But it also suggests that the elephants of west Africa, which live in both the forest and savanna, represent a third, genetically distinct population that has been diverging from the other two groups for some two million years.