COULD elephants have evolved from aquatic mammals which changed their minds about living in the water? The idea is not new but now there is solid evidence that close kin of elephants lived in Egyptian freshwater swamps or rivers 37 million years ago.
With its long tubular head and body, and disproportionately small legs, the hog-sized Moeritherium would not have walked easily on land, says Elwyn Simons of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But fossil skeletons of this elephant cousin were incomplete and the sediments in which it was found left its living place unclear. So Simons and…
