Elephants: Earth’s giant climate change canaries

Research project traces 60 million years of elephant evolution and how humans may be the species' undoing. University of Michigan researcher Bill Sanders poses with a newly discovered skull and skeleton of a palaeoloxodont elephant, which is about 1.2 million years old. Sanders, a paleontologist, has been studying proboscideans, the order of mammals to which elephants belong, since graduate school in the 1980s. But on the Arabian Peninsula, his colleagues wanted to show him something he had never seen before. They drove out into the desert, an expanse of land that would have been connected to the African continent 8 million years ago. At that time, the animals that ranged the landscape migrated back and forth between the continents. Some 7 million to 8 million years ago, a herd of at least 13 elephants trod the desert.