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Digging into the past, Dorothea Bates, Living

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Evidence of pygmy elephants can be in remote places

Thousands of years ago pygmy elephants lived on the island and a new species of them has recently been discovered ZOE CHRISTODOULIDES is told

It was the start of the 1900s and a passionate young female explorer in her early twenties named Dorothea Bates left England to leave her footprints all over Cyprus in search of unusual fossils. Considering the fact that travel was a rare phenomenon back in those days - with a woman wandering the streets and countryside alone in a foreign land being even more unprecedented - the intrepid woman adventurer and pioneering fossil hunter certainly made an impression on the unknown land she was visiting. And without even realising it, she was facilitating great research into the history of the island, uncovering fossils that were to shed light on the most unusual findings.

Unbeknown to anyone at the time, this little country was previously known to herds of dwarf elephants who lived a happy existence along side each other in the extensive marshes and forested areas that once covered various parts the country. Remains of the species were first discovered and recorded in a cave in the Kyrenia mountains in 1902. 

Rather unfathomable for us living here today, these little creatures officially named Elephas cypriotes bate (believed to be descendants of the straight-tusked elephant) weighed little more than 150kg, compared to a 10,000 kg ancestor. Considering that there are only a handful of countries in the world that ever witnessed the presence of these animals, the findings were no small deal. 

But despite continued interest over the intervening years, these dwarf animals remain little understood, with the fossils themselves on show faraway at London’s Natural History Museum. Step in a young palaeontologist who works at the museum named Victoria Herridge who arrived on the island a few weeks ago to take part in specific research aiming to shed light on what has so far remained unknown.

“What factors exactly contributed to their dwarfing? When exactly did they live here until? And why did they become extinct?” she asks. The 31-year-old spent much time on the island with her hands and knees buried deep in dirt as she brushed off the earth from intriguing fossils.

Presenting her findings as part of a series of talks given at the small Natural History Museum in Nicosia, Victoria has been funded for this Mediterranean project by the UK based NERC (Natural Environment Research Council). A big phenomenon for the Mediterranean region as a whole, fossil remains of dwarf elephants dating from 800,000 to 11,000 years ago have also been found in Malta, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, the Cyclades and the Dodecanese Islands. “Some dwarf elephants also existed off the coast of California and Indonesia but of course, there are no such living elephants in the world today.”  

Putting all the pieces of the intriguing historical puzzle together is something that should add to the knowledge we have of the Cypriot past. “Everyone should care about their land but we really want to find out when they were living on the islands to put them in the bigger scale of evolution and climatic change,” points out Victoria. “Was it humans or was it the climate that made them extinct? We’re using the past to indicate what might happen in the future in terms of global warming and sea levels changing.”

But if the dwarf elephants are a big deal, one has to wonder why it’s taken so long to embark on real investigations? “It’s difficult with such old fossils because you need top equipment and skills,” explains Victoria. “What we’re trying to do is bring local knowledge of where these fossils can be found together with skilled palaeontologists who can test them. No one here in Cyprus is doing any scientific research on the specific matter but there are plenty of locals who are passionate about making discoveries.” 

She workedg closely with local enthusiast George Constantinou, the Head of the Association for the Protection of Natural Heritage and Biodiversity of Cyprus who happens to possess one of the biggest fossil collections on the island. But more than this, George and his wife Fani also recently came across a whole new kind of dwarf elephant remains in the Larnaca region with findings indicating that this different species weighed 600kg as opposed to the much smaller version discovered by the young Dorothea so many decades ago. This new species has yet to be given an official name. 

Heading out on plenty of field trips with George, Victoria spent much time on her recent trip collecting samples of sediment to be sent off for research, working on this project in collaboration with expert teams from the University of Oxford, Bristol, York, California and the Australian National University. “It’s hard work. You often have to be prepared to do a lot of hands-on labour, especially if the fossils are deep in hard rock,” she says with a pause. “You know, you might spend 12 hours a day in the hot sun breaking rocks like a construction worker or prisoner but it’s so exciting,” she says with a chuckle.

Interested in biology and evolution since she was a young child, she found woolly mammoths particularly fascinating and always wanted to look into the past. Trying to pinpoint exactly when the fossils date back to is one of the ongoing research questions that takes up a great amount of time. “We think these dwarf elephants became extinct 10,000 years ago with a site discovered at Akrotiri definitely pointing towards their existence up until that point. Maybe it was humans that caused their extinction but we don’t know yet. More than that we’re also hoping to find out when exactly they appeared on the island.” With dwarf elephant fossils apparently located all across the country, exact locations are rarely motioned in order to avoid any unwanted destruction. But as long as it’s professionals like Victoria that keep on digging for answers, we’d like to think that the history of these animals should soon become text book knowledge in the very near future.