In 2003, researchers published a paper in PLoS Biology that came to a conclusion often reached by biologists studying unique, island-bound species: Borneo's pygmy elephants - forest-dwelling pachyderms of diminutive stature and timid demeanor - are genetically distinct from other Asian elephant subspecies, and they've evolved for millennia separated from their cousins in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere. But then the researchers changed their minds.
Since that paper, they've fleshed out an alternate scenario that's decidedly more exotic. Specifically, wildlife biologist Junaidi Payne, based at the World Wide Fund for Nature-Malaysia, and colleagues now suspect that the elephants are remnants of a population believed to be extinct for more than 200 years.
Their theory goes like this: The sultan of Java gifted a few hundred elephants native to the island of Java (now part of Indonesia) to the sultan of Sulu more than 600 years ago. The sultan of Sulu kept ...
