During the early 1990s, John Blashford-Snell, Rula Lenska and other travelled to Nepal to find and photograph the giant #elephants Raja Gaj and Kansha. They succeeded, and got great images of both animals. They later wrote a book about their adventures... 1/n 
The twin-domed skulls and convex trunk bases of these animals - Raja Gaj in particular - led to suggestions (albeit only in talks and popular articles) that they were 'living mammoths' or 'living stegodonts'. I asked Blashford-Snell a few times where these ideas came from... 2/n
They were the result of confusion. The Nepalese giants had been compared by some elephant experts to Elephas hysudricus, an Asian #Pleistocene fossil #elephant with very prominent cranial doming. No deliberate reference to mammoths OR stegodonts! 3/n
[Images above by Margaret Flinsch and Paulus Edward Pieris Deraniyagala] While Raja Gaj might look a bit like the extinct E. hysudricus, the similarity is superficial. Old bull Asian #elephants can grow massive twinned domes: look at this animal at Hagenbeck Zoo...
DNA from the Nepalese #elephants confirmed that they're part of Elephas maximus, albeit a bottlenecked population. The story of 'the living stegodonts that weren't' is covered here at #TetZoo... tetzoo.com/blog/2022/8/24…
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