DINING WITH BABY ELEPHANTS
MNU – Museum of Nature and Mankind – Padua January 22, 5:30 PM
How do you reconstruct the diet of an extinct animal?
A meeting with evolutionary biologists Manuela Gialanella and Simone Rebuffi, dedicated to the diet of dwarf elephants that lived in the Pleistocene. In Pleistocene Sicily, around half a million years ago, tiny elephants, smaller than a pony, roamed. If they had survived to the present day, perhaps we would now be observing these bizarre creatures in nature and in our gardens. But sadly, that wasn’t the case. The dwarf elephants Palaeoloxodon falconeri became extinct, as did the other species of small elephants that appeared on the island after them, Palaeoloxodon mnaidriensis. Today, tens of thousands of years later, is it possible to discover anything about their behavior? For example, what did they eat? Science provides us with the tools to travel into the past (even without a time machine) to seek answers to this and other questions.
The event includes a presentation in the Auditorium, introduced by Marzia Breda, curator of the zoology collection, followed by an in-depth tour of the Museum’s Large Vertebrate Gallery, dedicated to dwarf elephants, led by Marzia Breda and Mariagabriella Fornasiero, curator of the geology and paleontology collection. A further in-depth tour will be conducted by the two speakers on the ground floor, where visitors can closely observe a selection of artifacts, matrices, and casts of elephant teeth, providing a concrete understanding of the tools used in research.
Participation is free and does not include a full tour of the Museum.
To participate, please book online at the following link: https://visitmnu.it/evento/a-tavola-con-gli-elefantini/