Elephant bird that apparently originated from Marco Polo's account of the rukh in 1298, although he was apparently referring to an eagle-like bird strong enough to "seize an elephant with its talons". Sightings of eggs of elephant birds by sailors (e.g. text on the Fra Mauro map of 1467–69, if not attributable to ostriches) could also have been erroneously attributed to a giant raptor from Madagascar. The legend of the roc could also have originated from sightings of such a giant subfossil eagle related to the African crowned eagle, which has been described in the genus "Stephanoaetus" from Madagascar, being large enough
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