Posts Tagged ‘african elephants’

March 2008. It was hot! About 32 degrees and no wind at all. The region we were driving through was dry and dusty. We were on route to Shingwedzi camp and it was around 3 pm. We needed to keep going at a steady pace if we were going to make camp before the gates close…

On the Old Main Road loop there was nobody else on the road. We had spotted a couple of elephants at the waterhole and were baking in the heat. The road was dirt and the shrub quite thick and close. This made spotting quite difficult and the sun was keeping the wildlife in the shade – or so we thought… Read the rest »

The only extant (living) species in the Order Proboscidae are the elephants. The order, however, includes a number of other now extinct species. The earliest record of a member in this group was a small pig-like creature called Moertherium. It lived in a swamp area in what is now modern day Egypt some 50 million years ago. There were a number of other species like it who in turn evolved into the Woolly Mammoths and Imperial Mammoths. Read the rest »