Instead of one species of elephant, Africa has two, researchers said on Tuesday, confirming suspicions about the two distinctly different looking pachyderms.

Using gene sequencing tools, teams from Harvard, the University of Illinois and the University of York in Britain have shown that instead of being the same species — as scientists have long believed — the African savanna elephant and the smaller African forest elephant are distant cousins, having been largely separated for 2 million to 7 million years.