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
African elephant date between forest and savanna elephants was 2.6 – 5.6 million years ago, similar to the divergence date estimated for the Asian elephant and the woolly mammoths (2.5 – 5.4 million years ago), which strongly supports their status as separate species. Forest elephants were found to have a high degree of genetic diversity, perhaps reflecting periodic fragmentation of their habitat during the climatic changes of the Pleistocene. However, recent DNA sequence analysis indicates that the extinct European straight-tusked elephant, "Palaeoloxodon antiquus", is closer to "L. cyclotis" than "L. cyclotis" is to "L. africana", thus invalidating "Loxodonta" as currently recognized. African