Æpyornis Island Æpyornis Island "Æpyornis Island", or "Aepyornis Island", is a short story by H. G. Wells, first published in 1894 in the "Pall Mall Budget". It was included in "The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents", the first collection of short stories by Wells, first published in 1895. In the story, a man looking for eggs of "Aepyornis", an extinct flightless bird, passes two years alone on a small island with an "Aepyornis" that has hatched. "Aepyornis maximus" (the Giant elephant-bird) was a giant flightless bird that lived in Madagascar; it became extinct probably because it was hunted excessively by humans. The
Borneo elephant Museum of Natural History disagreed in 1943, and placed all Sundaic elephants in the subspecies "Elephas maximus sumatrensis". In 1950, Paules Edward Pieris Deraniyagala described a subspecies "Elephas maximus borneensis", taking as his type an illustration in the National Geographical Magazine. In 2003, the debate was re-opened by a suggestion that the introduced Sulu elephants and the north-east Borneo population might have descended from the now extinct Javan elephant, which was named "Elephas maximus sondaicus" by Deraniyagala. This hypothesis is based on missing archaeological evidence of long term elephant habitation in Borneo, a corroboration in folklore and that elephants have