Several million years ago, the smallest mammoths in the history lived on the island Crete, being even in the adulthood comparable in size to modern baby elephants. This is very surprising and interesting.

The adult «Mammuthus creticus» weighted less than 300 kilograms and his height at the withers was about one meter.

The first fossils of the Cretan mammoth were found back in 1904 by Dorothea Bate, known at the time as fossil hunter. However, initially they were incorrectly identified as belonging to “Palaeoloxodon creticus”, allegedly a relative of the dwarf elephant from Crete, having straights tusks and already known. Although the found teeth were very similar to those of a mammoth, scientists of the early 20^th century just could not believe that exactly two types of dwarf Proboscidea could live together on the one island.

In summer 2011, new discoveries of these mysterious animals were made on Cretan Malekas Cape which had been mentioned in Bate’s field diaries. Those results have given the basis to review the position of Cretan mammoths in the whole system. After examining the teeth morphology and DNA residues, British scientists came to conclusion, that in fact the animal is closer to the genus of mammoths.

Together with the teeth has been found the humerus, and after measurement of it, could be calculated the height of an adult animal. That creature resembled a modern baby Asian elephant but had more stocky shape and developed tusks. According to scientists, the Cretan dwarf mammoth is a product of the evolution of the late Pliocene island mammoth, extinct in Europe around 800 thousand years ago.

Dwarfism is the known evolutionary response of large mammals on the island conditions. Food shortages and lack of predators reduce the size of former giants. In Crete, insular dwarfism reached its extreme manifestation, creating the smallest mammoth of ever known to science. This shows an independent and simultaneous development of extremes of the island dwarfism in two different lines of elephants.

According to the paleontologist Martin Sander from the University of Bonn, Mediterranean islands have seen not only dwarf elephants. Fossils tell us that they held once pygmy hippos and dwarf deer. Now the Cretan mammoth will join the list of its dwarf relatives from the Wrangel island and Channel islands of California.

View on extinct animals – dinosaurs can be in the DINOSAURIA PARK.