The Mysterious Borneo Pygmy Elephant: Dung, DNA and Damn Good Science. More scientific studies needed not only for elephant but for other wildlife too.

DNA Solutions created the 'home paternity kit' in 1997, which was a new concept where people for the first time could take samples for DNA testing at home, instead of in the laboratory. Originally the kits worked by people taking a hair sample, and posting into the laboratory for testing. The kit was first reported in the Australian newspaper The Herald in 1998.
These home testing kits have since revolutionized DNA testing, and the industry has subsequently adopted DNA Solutions' terminology of using "home kit" and "home paternity kit" a term now used by virtually all DNA testing companies and laboratories for the "use at home" DNA testing

services.http://www.greenfudge.org/2009/08/30/the-mysterious-borneo-pygmy-elephant-dung-dna-and-damn-good-science/

This gave rise to a fanciful tale that these elephants were introduced to the island. During the 16^th to 18^th centuries, the elephant trade was in full swing. In the 1700s, as the story goes, elephants were imported to Borneo as gifts to honor the Sultan of Sulu. Why is finding the true origin of the Borneo elephant important? There are four subspecies of Asian elephants, so let’s look at the number of remaining wild elephants for an answer: Indian Elephant (20,000 to 25,000)  Sri Lankan Elephant (3,000) Sumatran Elephant (1,000) Borneo Elephant (1,000). In a 2003 study, researchers pickup up dung from free-ranging elephants along the Kinabatangan River. They also extracted blood samples from captive animals in Borneo. DNA tests and comparisons with samples from other Asian elephants revealed that Borneo elephants are different.

In a failsafe statement, the researchers (Fernando et al. 2003) solved all the mystery: “We reject the hypothesis that Borneo’s elephants were introduced. The genetic divergence of Borneo elephants warrants their recognition as a separate evolutionary significant unit.” For 300 years people believed that the elephants arrived in Borneo as a gesture of goodwill. Good scientific detective work shows that the species may have split from the family tree over 300,000 years ago and isolated when Borneo separated from the Asian mainland.

The alarm for Borneo elephants just got louder. As a new endangered subspecies, it is even more critical to save the genetic distinctiveness of the small population of Bornean pachyderms. As concluded by the 2003 study this “makes them one of the highest priority populations for Asian elephant conservation.”