A happy discovery in the museum

We spent the morning in the Archaeological Museum in Syracuse, Sicily. It was packed, of course, with the most fabulous of artifacts, most beautifully displayed. But for this old zoologist, the prize exhibit had to be this extinct Pleistocene dwarf elephant in the pre-history section. I had always wanted to see one, and there it was!

One of nature's quirks is that when small animals colonise islands they tend to get larger over time, and, conversely, large animals tend to get smaller. So, common voles Microtus arvalis weigh about 30 grams on Continental Europe but on the Orkney Islands, to where they were introduced by Neolithic settlers, they now weigh about 100 grams! We all know how very large a modern elephant is, but those living on Sicily (Palaeoloxodon falconeri), were only a metre high and weighed only 200 kg, a 98% weight reduction from their 10 tonne ancestors!