Elephant bird The bones of these domesticated fowl have been found in subfossil sites in the island (MacPhee and Marx, 1997: 188), such as Ambolisatra (Madagascar), where "Mullerornis" sp. and "Aepyornis maximus" have been reported. Also reported by these authors, ratite remains have been found in west and south west Madagascar, at Belo-sur-Mer ("A. medius", "Mullerornis rudis"), Bemafandry ("M. agilis") and Lamboharana ("Mullerornis" sp.). Recently human tool marks have been found on elephant bird bones dating to approximately 10,000 BC. This not only vastly extends the range of human existence on Madagascar's prehistoric past, but suggests a more complex relationship between these
Pygmy elephant with "dwarf elephant", which is used for a number of extinct species of elephants that evolved their size due to island dwarfing. Pygmy elephants inhabited the islands from the Mediterranean region during the Pleistocene period but became extinct in the course of the Holocene. Despite striking distinctive anatomical characteristics related to insularity, some similarities with the lineage of extant Asian elephants have suggested that pygmy elephants could be most probably seen as members of the genus "Elephas". Poulakakis "et al." (2006) have recently challenged this view by recovering a short mtDNA sequence from an 800 000 year old fossil of