Do Asian and African elephants have different kinematics?
Although we found statistically significant differences in all but relative limb phases and fore-minus hindlimb duty factors, we doubt that these differences have tremendous biological significance. The differences in absolute terms are all quite small and our sample was not ideally representative (or random) for African elephants (14 individuals vs 48 Asian). Because African and Asian elephants share a common ancestry with extinct mammoths (Mammuthus spp.) as members of the Elephantidae (Krause et al., 2006; Thomas et al., 2000), we expect that mammoths and other extinct elephantids moved similarly to extant elephants, except where there are major size, shape or other mechanically relevant differences. We expect that even dwarf insular forms, if morphologically similar to baby elephants, would have moved similarly. This is because small baby elephants only differ in their relative locomotor abilities compared to large adults; they do not use drastically different kinematics. This comm
