A study conducted by scientists at The University of Texas
at Austin recently sequenced the genomes of 14 living and extinct elephant
species to try and understand the potential gene flow within this group. This
was done by mapping out the genome of living species such as the African forest
elephant, the Savanna elephant, the Asian elephants, along with other like species,
and then compared them with the genome of extinct species such as the woolly
mammoth, the straight-tusked elephant, and the American mastodon. By doing this
they were able to see the decent pattern of modern day elephants. One of the
many things they discovered was that the straight tusked elephant, which went
extinct approximately 120 thousand years ago, and the present-day forest
elephants dissented from a related lineage.
Additionally, we have come to learn that in both past and present
elephant genomes there seems to be a high amount of hybridization which has led
to the group’s current speciation.

One
of the more notable discovers that came from this study was that African forest
elephants and the Savanna elephant appeared to have diverged over 2 million
years ago and have been genetically separated for around 500 thousand years. This
discovery’s significance lies in the fact that it ends the debate of whether
these two types of elephants are separate species which, evidently, they are.
Because of this, these two groups of elephants can now receive more effective
conservation efforts, as they can be specifically geared, and funded, to the
individual species environmental resource requirements, and threats (Daley).
With the advancements in genomics, both in efficiency and accuracy,
demonstrated here with the successful mapping of the elephant’s genome, its
applications and implications are vast and profound to say the least.
The article can be found at https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/51918/title/Extinct-and-Living-Elephants--Genomic-History-Sequenced/
And here is the link to the original study that http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/16/1720554115
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