For the first time, an international research team, headed by a Greek scientist, analyzed at the same time the DNA of ancient and modern elephants, illuminating – more than ever before – the highly complex evolutionary history of these animals, as well.
Elephants – the largest animals on Earth today – appeared in Africa five to ten million years ago, and today they live less than 500,000. The number of them is decreasing constantly, despite the protection measures, as they face great dangers from the poachers, with the consequence that some 50,000 elephants are killed every year
Modern elephants are classified into three species: the Asian (Elephas maximus) and the two African, one of the forests (Loxodonta cyclotis) and one of the saxophone (Loxodonta africana). Separation of African elephants into two separate species was made only in 201
According to scientists, the history of these animals is so complex because there has been extensive adultery in the distant past, something (19659002) This lack of admiration among the three remaining elephants, two in Africa and one in Asia, raises concerns about their survival in the future. Instead, frequent implications largely explain the success of mammoths in so many different environments and for such a long time
Scientists from the USA, Canada, Sweden and Germany, headed by Dr. Eleftheria Palkopoulou, postdoctoral Harvard Medical School Researcher at the Harvard University Medical School, who published the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS), "read" the genome of 14 living and disappearing elephants
The confirmation analysis Inter alia, that the elephants on the African savannah are distinct species of elephants in African forests. The two species deviated evolutionarily two to five million years ago, and their descendants have remained largely isolated in the last 500,000 years, with few interlinkages in areas adjacent to their habitats
Mixtures are common between animals with close affinity, e.g. among the brown and polar bears, the Eurasian jackal and the wolf, etc. But it has not happened for a long time, but very rarely, between the two neighboring species of African elephants.
Moreover, the analysis of the extinct long-standing American mastiff revealed that these animals were separated from the broader family of elephants.
Eleftheria Palkopoulou was born in 1984 and graduated in 2006 from the Department of Biology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She did her postgraduate studies in biology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and received her doctorate in Systematic Zoology from the University of Stockholm, where she specialized at the Swedish Natural History Museum in Pallogenetics, especially with regard to mammoths. From 2015 she is conducting research in the US as a post-doctoral associate at the laboratory of pioneering geneticist David Reich at the Genetics Department of the Harvard University Medical School.
Source: tech2.org