Centuries of trophy and commercial hunting, isolation in captivity and poaching, have caused a baseline shift in the perception of iconic megafauna such as Asian and African elephants, which should actually be benchmarked with their species of 3,500 and 150 years ago, respectively. The shifting baseline syndrome can be defined as “ a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of human experience, memory and/or knowledge of its past condition”. Indeed, in his famous Proboscidea monograph (1936), Henry Osborn depicts African elephants with very big ivory, in the same league with prehistoric stars, while Asian elephants sport average ivory, showing that 100 years ago the image of the Asian elephants
