Using state-of-the-art methods researchers decipher the DNA of ancient elephants and discover their family relations to be quite different

New research reveals that a giant elephant that lived 1.5 million to 100,000 years ago - ranging across Eurasia before it went extinct - is more closely related to today's African forest elephant than the forest elephant is to its nearest living relative, the African savannah elephant. The study challenges a long-held assumption among paleontologists that the extinct giant, Paleoloxodon antiquus, was most closely related to the Asian elephant. The findings, reported in the journal eLife on 06 June 2017, also add to the evidence that today's African elephants belong to two distinct species, not one, as was once assumed.