Elephant bird bird" egg after it was radiographed. It is widely believed that the extinction of "Aepyornis" was a result of human activity. The birds were initially widespread, occurring from the northern to the southern tip of Madagascar. One theory states that humans hunted the elephant birds to extinction in a very short time for such a large landmass (the Blitzkrieg hypothesis). There is indeed evidence that they were hunted and their preferred habitats destroyed. Eggs may have been particularly vulnerable. 19th-century travelers saw eggshells used as bowls, and a recent archaeological study found remains of eggshells among the remains of human
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