Madagascar (TV series) in March 2011. In this one-off programme, David Attenborough undertakes a personal journey back to Madagascar to investigate the fate of "Aepyornis", the island's extinct elephant birds. Believed to be the largest birds which have ever lived, evidence of their existence can still be found on the island. Whilst filming "Zoo Quest to Madagascar" in 1961, Attenborough pieced together a complete elephant bird egg from fragments of shell collected for him. "Madagascar" was first announced in March 2009 as a partnership between Animal Planet and BBC Worldwide. Production duties were handled by the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, with
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