If ever there was a contender for “giant dwarfs” or “the world’s biggest dwarf”, pygmy elephants are it. Even a five-foot at the shoulder pygmy elephant would still be a massive beast. I wanted to call this work Slightly Smaller Elephants – Possibly but I was persuaded that Pygmy Elephants had a better ring to it. There have in the past – millions to hundreds of thousands of years ago – been smaller species of elephants, well-documented in the fossil record, some of whom we will meet shortly. And there have been claims made for the existence of living pygmy elephants in various remote and not-so-remote parts of the world today.