Talk:Battle of the Bagradas River (255 BC)

Elephants
Hi and thanks for the input on elephants. Although some of it has puzzled me a bit, so I will lay out my concerns below and then give you a chance to come back at me.


 * 1) I am aware of war elephants, I linked to the article in the sentence you edited. It is so poorly sourced as to not be much use in my opinion.
 * 2) There are two species of African elephant - the bush elephant and the forest elephant. The forest variety is by far the smaller, about 2.4 m (8 ft) at the shoulder.
 * 3) Miles, p. 240, explicitly states that the indigenous North African elephant, the ones he states are used by the Carthaginians, was not the African bush elephant (nor the Asian elephant), but a now-extinct relative of the African forest elephant which he says "measured around 2.5 m high at the shoulder".
 * 4) Goldsworthy, p. 34, says they "were probably African forest elephants".
 * 5) Lazenby, p. 27, states that "almost certainly" they were forest elephants.

So, could you specify your source(s) for removing my mention of "indigenous African forest elephants" and instead referring to African bush elephants?

Cheers Gog the Mild (talk) 16:59, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I dug a bit on this. I was initially concerned by the existence of this article on North African elephant (Loxodonta africana pharaohensis), which supports the existence of a species of African elephant different from both the Forest and the Bush elephants, but apparently it seems that this "third species" of African elephant is erroneous. From what I read in Klaus Karttunen "Bird-Watchers and Story-Tellers" pp.196-7. It came from a supposition made in 1955 by an author named Deraniyagala. H. H. Scullard, the specialist of elephants in the ancient world, said the North African elephant was the same as the Forest Elephants, but they were separated by the desertification of the Sahara (here, p. 161); I suppose that the later statement from Miles, Goldsworthy etc. comes from there. So, in short, you can revert my edit (never trust Wikipedia lol); the article on the North African elephant may also have to be merged into that of the Forest Elephant. T8612  (talk) 20:44, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Cheers for that. I suppose that speciating extinct animals must be tricky. I shall rewrite it a little - possibly tomorrow - now that that you have drawn my attention to it. Let me know if the revised version rings any further alarm bells. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:51, 25 March 2020 (UTC)