19/09/2025
๐Not so long ago, many elephant species roamed the earth - including a tiny elephant the size of a dog. Dr Tori Herridge is fascinated by them all...
British-born Tori, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield, has dedicated much of her life to studying fossil elephants. But at first, she didn't even think science was for her.
As a young girl she was more interested in arts subjects, until she found out about the ice ages - times in Earth's history when temperatures plummeted and ice sheets covered swathes of the planet.
"That really captured my imagination and suddenly it felt creatively interesting," she says.
Seeing science as a creative subject was a lightbulb moment for Tori ๐ก. And while studying human evolution, she began to realise how closely connected humans and elephants are.
According to Tori, elephant evolution can help shed light on our own history.
"Elephant species created the landscape in which our species evolved, and they have been with us every step of the way on our evolutionary journey," she says.
Tori says elephants hold the key to many things - for example, why animals evolve to certain sizes. She has made a special study of dwarf elephants, some of which were only a meter (3.2ft) tall.
Tori sees herself as following in the footsteps of forgotten female scientists - like Dorothea Bate, a palaeontologist who demanded a job at London's Natural History Museum in the late 1800s at the age of 19.
"They never gave her a job, not for years," says Tori. "Butโฆ they did support her in applying for funding to go on excavations."
One of those excavations was in Cyprus, where Bate discovered many dwarf elephant fossils. And what intrigues Tori is that Bate wasn't alone - she worked alongside several other female scientists.
"The more I looked into it, the more I realised that this was not an unusual situation," says Tori. "There were many women doing this."
Now Tori is carrying on the tradition of great female scientis
