Elephant bird birds and human beings and their eventual extinction, as they apparently coexisted for a massive period of time. However, the absence so far for any evidence of human habitation in the succeeding 6000 years raises difficult questions concerning whether the early human presence might have been temporary, and/or restricted to just a portion of the island. Elephant bird Elephant birds are members of the extinct ratite family Aepyornithidae, made up of large to enormous flightless birds that once lived on the island of Madagascar. They became extinct, perhaps around 1000–1200 CE, for reasons that are unclear, although human activity is
Elephant not indigenous to the island but were brought there before 1521 by the Sultan of Sulu from Java, where elephants are now extinct. The African elephant was first named by German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1797 as "Elephas africanus". The genus "Loxodonta" was named by Frédéric Cuvier in 1825. Cuvier spelled it "Loxodonte," but in 1827 an anonymous author romanised the spelling to "Loxodonta"; the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature recognises this as the proper authority. In 1942, 18 subspecies of African elephant were recognised by Henry Fairfield Osborn, but further morphological data has reduced the number of classified