The African elephant has only four toes on the front feet and three on the back. Interestingly, it has one more vertebra in the lumbar section of the spine. Both sexes have tusks, and they are also larger in size as compared to male and female Asian elephants. The largest African elephant recorded weighed over nine tons and stood more than twelve feet high at the shoulder. As in Asian elephants, the female African elephant is generally half the size of a fully grown male.
Gestation period tends to be slightly longer than in the Asian elephant.
They have smaller ears which are straight at the bottom, unlike the large fan-shape ears of the African species. Asian elephants are much smaller, weighing between 6,615 and 11,020 pounds at a height of about 7 to 12 feet compared to the 8,820 to 15,430 at 10 to 13 feet of the African elephant. Asian elephants live in many different habitats including open grasslands, marshes, savannas and forests. The IUCN's Species Survival Commission's Asian Elephant Specialist Group estimates that there are approximately 38,000 to 51,000 wild Asian elephants. In comparison, there are more than 600,000 African elephants.