The pachyderms that are among the primitive beings on this earth, seemed to have followed the colony system, even before man evolved…. Some 7mn years back.

The heavy pachyderms had dominated the earth since quite long. But an interesting fact revealed in a study by the researchers revealed that the world’s oldest elephant tracks have now been revealed, 7 million-year-old footprints in the Arabian Desert. And the tracks suggest that the animals lived in herds.

Researchers say that the pre historic foot prints discovered suggests that the animal was a social being and lived in herds. The tracks was likely suggest that about 13 four tusked elephant lived long back at the site.

"The track ways are visually stunning," said researcher Andrew Hill at the University of Poitiers in France. "It is quite obvious to anyone, without any technical knowledge, that these are the footprints of very large animals, and to learn that they are over 6 million years old presents a visitor with the sensation of walking back in time." The site, known as Mleisa 1, is in the United Arab Emirates.

Fossil track ways in the region have been long known to locals, and were taken to be the prints of dinosaurs or giants of ancient myth. It was not until January 2011, when researchers mapped the area from the air for the first time, "that we realized what we had and how we could go about studying it," said researcher Faysal Bibi, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin.  (With inputs from internet: AarKay)