Elephants in ancient China Elephants in ancient China The existence of elephants in ancient China is attested both by archaeological evidence and by depictions in Chinese artwork. Long thought to belong to an extinct subspecies of Asian elephants, named "Elephas maximus rubridens", they lived in Central and Southern China before the 14th century BC. They once occurred as far north as Anyang, Henan in northern China. The elephant is mentioned in the earliest received texts, including the "Shijing", "Liji", and "Zuozhuan." The oracle bone script and bronzeware script glyphs for elephant are pictographic depictions of an animal with a long trunk. Their modern descendant
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History naturally found in Panama. This left a puzzling question: how did the fungus get to Panama? Evidence indicates that humans were instrumental in how the fungus traveled. Kolbert uses the frog-fungus relationship as a symbol of how humans are introducing invasive species to various environments, where native species would normally have the proper distribution of alleles for their environment. Kolbert explains how fossils of the American mastodon ("Mammut americanum") shaped Georges Cuvier's views on catastrophism. According to Cuvier, there was no reason the mastodon should have died out. The mastodon was large enough to avoid predation, had large enough teeth