Dwarf Elephant

Dwarf elephants were prehistoric elephants, which lives in the Pleistocene period of history.

They were members of a family of animals which had evolved to about a tenth of the size of elephants today they lived in many areas of the world including what are now called the Channel Islands of California.

They are considered to be one of the only elephant of the Mediterranean islands belonging to the mammoth line.

Dwarf Elephant

A DNA research which was published in 2006 supposed that the dwarf elephant of California could be the mammoth line too.

This old theory, proposed by Bate ever since 1905, is not widely accepted. Today most of scientists disagree, and a scientific study of 2007 intimates that the study of 2006 was wrong.

Scientists seemingly cannot agree on exactly what the dwarf elephant was, but they do seem to agree that during times when the seas were lowered, the Mediterranean islands were colonized and gave rise to many species of several different sized, which was then decolonized later one in time.

These dwarf elephants were different on each island or group of very close islands and so could not have been the same animals.

There are many simply too many uncertainties about the time of colonization, the status and size and many other things about the dwarf elephants on the Mediterranean islands.
All we really know is that they were there.