Review : Trouble with trunks

Somewhere in Mammoth Hunt (HarperCollins, £16.99, ISBN 0 00 255672 3)
is a good story about a population of elephants in Nepal with craggy heads that
seem to resemble the ancestors of modern elephants. Adrian Blashford-Snell and
the glamorous Rula Lenska set out to find them, and Adrian Lister, a real
scientist, went along to check DNA from the living elephants’ dung, comparing it
with fossil bones of the ancestral Elephas hysudricus, and so on. Not quite like
finding a mammoth, but great stuff. Sadly, the tale gets lost among cold lagers
and “mouthwatering sauces”. I wish publishers would learn that good biology
needs no dilution with by-the-yard travelogue.