Elephant bird determined that "Vorombe titan" reached weights of and stood tall, making it the world's largest bird, slightly larger than the much older "Dromornis stirtoni". Elephant birds have been extinct since at least the 17th century. Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s, mentions an ostrich-like bird said to inhabit unpopulated regions, though it is unclear whether he was repeating folk tales passed on from generations earlier. In 1659, Flacourt wrote of the "vouropatra – a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places
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