An Asian elephant (Elephas maximus)FLICKR, ARRAN ETSequencing proteins collected from an old specimen of a fetal elephant, examined by Carl Linnaeus in the mid-18th century, has revealed that the founding father of modern taxonomy got it wrong: what he called the type specimen of the Asian elephant is actually a baby African elephant, according to a study published this week (November 4) in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Linnaeus acquired the specimen after convincing King Adolf Frederick of Sweden to purchase it for his personal collection. “I am pleased that the little elephant has arrived. If he costs a lot, he was worth it. Certainly, he is as rare as a diamond,” Linnaeus wrote in a letter to a friend dated May 18, 1753, according to Nature.
The taxonomist described the fetus in his life’s work—Systema Naturae, published in 1735—as Elephas maximus, now commonly known as the Asian elephant. But when the specimen was transferred to the Swedish Natural History Museum in the early 1800s, the curators began to suspect the baby was actually an African elephant, with its unusually large ears and domed head.
A century later, Anthea Gentry, a mammals curator ...
