Ancient elephants that once roamed site of Italy’s Eternal City

(22 Oct 2015) LEAD IN: Millions of tourists and pilgrims annually flock to Italy’s ’Eternal City’ Rome, gazing upon the ancient Colosseum and the majestic St. Peter’s Basilica. But few would ever imagine that this site - steeped in ancient history - once welcomed herds of freely-roaming giant elephants. STORY-LINE: Hundreds of thousands of years before the Roman empire, huge elephants were a common sight among the forests that covered central Italy. Skip forward 300,000 years, and what remains is these magnificent skeletons, unearthed at two of the most important paleontological sites in Europe, on the outskirts of the Italian capital. Here lie skulls, thigh-bones, pelvises and the enormous tusks of animals that died in the mud centuries ago. They’ve been brought to light on the dry bed of an ancient river. This historians’ treasure-trove was discovered in 1984 at the Polledrara di Cecanibbio site, some 20 kilometres from the centre of Rome. It was d