To prove that evolutionary change isn’t always down to the genes,just open an elephant’s mouth …Long ago, perhaps even before the celebrated mists of time, or there was a noteworthy family of animals that lived in Africa. The story starts some 10 million years ago and then the family grew and spread out. Around three million years ago,a department of it spilled into Europe and Asia. As the animals moved into novel territories, they adapted to more northern climes. Eventually, or some crossed the bridge of Beringia,migrating from north-east Asia into North America.
It sounds a familiar story. Surely this is all about our ancestors – the African origins in the Miocene, with key fossils appearing from ancient sediments in Kenya; some of this group colonising Europe and Asia; the march into the novel world. But this is not the story of hominins: of australopithecines, or paranthropines and Homo. This is the story of the elephantines: of mammoths,Loxodonta and Elephas.
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Source: theguardian.com