Incredible Shrinking Mammoth

Life is amazing; from the mysteries shrouding it's origins to the incredible diversity of life-forms on our little planet, living nature is full of wonders, surprises and beauty.

_{Image by Tim Evanson - source: Flickr}

Evolution theory is the scientific explanation for the amazing diversity of plants and creatures on our planet. Actually all life comes from one primordial single cell ancestor, and although from the outside all life looks different, genetically we're all the same for a big part. The genetic difference between individual humans today is about 0.1% on average, and we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees. Even genes from plants match ours for approximately 18% (source: Tracing Similarities And Differences In Our DNA).

This I find amazing, but is not what this post is about. We all know the Mammoth, those gigantic woolly elephants with tusks that would make a modern-day elephant green with envy. What I didn't know is that there also were dwarf mammoths living in small islands of what is now the Californian coastline. We found fossils of mammoths only half the size of a normal one; only 2 meters high at the shoulder instead of more than 4 meter. This is said to be the result of Foster's rule or the "island rule" or the "island effect".

members of a species get smaller or bigger depending on the resources available in the environment. For example, it is known that pygmy mammoths evolved from normal mammoths on small islands. Similar evolutionary paths have been observed in elephants, hippopotamuses, boas, sloths (such as Pygmy three-toed sloth), deer (such as Key deer) and humans.
_{source: Wikipedia}

A mammoth's gigantic body needs a lot of food, and on the mainland there was plenty available. The big body was also a natural defense against the predators of those days like the fearsome Saber-toothed tiger. Some of those big mainland mammoths must have smelled the vegetation on the islands, approximately 7 miles away, and swam there. And here evolution did it's amazing thing: suddenly there wasn't an unlimited supply of food, and suddenly there were no predators to defend against... Their size gave them no advantage anymore, and worked against them because of the limited food-supply, so natural selection began to favor mammoths with smaller body-sizes.

Somewhere along the way of becoming smaller, the differences with their mainland ancestors became large enough to speak of a new species: the Pygmy mammoth or Channel Islands mammoth (Mammuthus exilis). Here's a short information video from the Channel Islands National Park:

_{The Pygmy Mammoths on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, California}

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