Page 18 - eclipse - Autumn 2018

RESEARCH NEWS
Attenborough and the Giant Elephant documentary
Last December, John Hutchinson, Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics at the RVC featured alongside Sir David Attenborough in a new BBC documentary - Attenborough and the Giant Elephant.
Jumbo the elephant is often referred to as the world’s first animal superstar
and has inspired many Hollywood movies, including Disney’s Dumbo. During his 24-year life Jumbo, an African bush elephant born in Sudan, travelled the world and was exhibited in cities including Paris, London and New York.
In the BBC documentary, John joined
Sir David Attenborough to delve deeper into the story of Jumbo, studying skeletal evidence and unearthing information about his life, his size and his tragic death.
Here John shares some of his insights into the making of the documentary; the full version can be found on his blog: whatsinjohnsfreezer.com/2017/ 12/21/jumbo/
“Filming took place over a few days in May 2017 at the American Museum of Natural History’s warehouse of mammalian skeletal remains, which is housed deep in the Brooklyn Army Terminal; a picturesque site in and of itself.
It was a hectic week of the usual documentary stuff: repeat the same lines and motions again and again from
different angles and with different paces and intonations, with plenty of downtime watching setup or other bits being filmed. I’m used to all that. But having the time to peer around the collection and chat to Dr Richard Thomas and colleague Dr Holly Miller (handling the tissue isotopes side of the story) about Jumbo’s skeleton was a lot of fun during downtime and filming itself. Not to mention the utter joy of studying one of the most famous museum specimens ever, and an animal widely held to be one of the largest of its kind, with much mystery surrounding its history despite its fame.
Studying those bones
We’d seen photos before, and Henry Fairfield Osborn had illustrated the specimen in his book: ‘Proboscidea:
a monograph of the discovery, evolution, migration and extinction of the mastodonts and elephants of the world’ as his type of “Elephas africanus rothschildi” (Sudanese elephant; no longer valid but those were different times– it’s now just a nicely preserved Loxodonta africana africana), so we knew some of what to expect.
Looking at Osborn’s classic monograph, oddly he didn’t address the glaring massive problems with the teeth!
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HERE ARE SOME PHOTOS TO TELL THE STORY
First view of Jumbo’s remains.
Right forelimb, showing that the “growth plates” (epiphyses”) were not all fused, consistent with Jumbo still growing– as expected for an African male elephant in his 20’s.
Jumbo’s right hip, with bad erosion of the bone and thus presumably the overlying cartilage. Ouch!