March/April 2004
News

Tracking the Ancient Elephant

When Master's student Will Higgs first saw Lord of the Rings there was one particular on-screen creation which caught his eye.

The giant multi-tusked Mumakil in the film's battle scenes would have looked very much like the ancient elephants that Will has been studying.

Will Higgs examines the dried-up remains of a camel on a road in Abu Dhabi.

"When I saw the film, I said 'those are our Gomphotheres' - the elephants in the film had multiple pairs of tusks - just like the fossil ones had. They must have looked amazing," said Will.

Will is hoping to return later this year to the western region of Abu Dhabi in the Middle East, where he has been studying the fossilised footprints of a species of Gomphothere called Stegotetrabelodon syrticus.

"Mammoths are actually relatively modern elephants - what we are looking at are the ancestors of the mammoth.

"A young United Arab Emirates national familiar with this region drew our attention to the footprints - he noted that his father had once told him that they were dinosaur tracks.

"We think there were about 14 of these animals walking side-by-side but it is difficult to sort out the individual tracks until we get a chance to make a better survey".

Will Higgs' wife Alison (kneeling) and two staff at Blackpool Zoo measuring an elephant

The footprints are thought to be six to eight million years old and belong to the late Miocene period when human ancestors first appeared.

"People often think that footprints are just impressions of feet, but actually they are not. They are an expression of the forces that act through the foot."

By taking measurements of the spaces in between the prints, you can estimate pace and stride. Will believes that Gomphotheres would have been much bigger than the modern-day Asian elephants, which he studied at Blackpool Zoo as part of his research.

From the combined evidence of footprints and fossil bones found nearby Will explained that there is much that you could reconstruct about how this giant land mammal might have looked and moved.

"When you study fossil bones, you must remember that all sorts of things could have happened to the bones before they were fossilised. They could have been gnawed, weathered, carried by animals or swept away down a river. They are unlikely to be in the place where the animals actually lived.

"But with the footprints, you have evidence of the animals in the exact spot where they lived, and doing what they would normally be doing - these footprints are a great source of complementary evidence and when you put them together with the fossils, the information from each adds up to more than the sum of the parts".

Will explained that there are a number of methods that can be combined to date the geological formations containing the footprints. One is analysing the properties of the rocks in which the footprints are found, while another is identification of fossil species also found in other rocks of a known date.

"It becomes more and more exciting as you study past environments - you start to realise just how much reconstruction is possible."

Head of the University's Department of Archaeological Sciences and Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Anthropology Dr Randolph Donahue said: "The Mleisa site in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi adds to our understanding of the expanse of the savannah grasslands that extended from East Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula and west Asia to India during the Pliocene and much of the Pleistocene.

"It has major implications for the evolution and dispersal of animals adapted to this habitat including our early hominoid ancestors."

16 April 2004

next

top of page