Category: Animal House
Elephants are surely among the world's best loved animals but do you know just how extraordinary they really are? Here are twenty reasons why the elephant is probably the most amazing animal on earth.
1. Elephants are the world's tallest animals growing up to 4m (13ft) high. African elephants are bigger than their Asian cousins
2. Elephants are easily the heaviest land animals weighing up to 7,000kg (15,400lb).
3. Elephants are a matriarchal society with herds typically being led by the oldest female.
4. The elephants' ancestors used to live all around the globe. Fossils have been found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia.
5. The elephant's trunk is made up of 150,000 individual muscle units; by contrast there are only 640 muscles in the entire human body.
6. Elephants have the best sense of smell of all the world's animals. Monitored wild elephants have been shown to sense smells over several kilometers.
7. The tip of an elephant's trunk contains the most sensitive tissue ever studied.
8. Elephants grow six sets of teeth throughout their lifetimes. As the teeth wear down they fall out and are replaced by new ones. Once the sixth set wears out elephants usually starve to death.
9. The elephant is the only animal in the world with four knees.
10. An elephant's tusks are in fact elongated incisor teeth, the largest and heaviest teeth in the world. The heaviest tusk ever found weighed 97kg (214lbs) and was 3.5m (138inches) long.
11. An elephant's skin is 2.5cm (1inch) thick and is often covered with sparse but highly bristled hair. Despite its thickness the skin is very sensitive and an elephant can feel a mosquito bite. Elephants often cover their skin with mud and dust to protect it.
12. Elephants have an enormous vocal range and produce sounds through both their mouths and trunks. They can produce sounds ranging from a low snort to high pitched squeaks of excitement or a deafening full blown trumpet.
13. Elephants also use something known as infrasound to communicate with each other. This is a very low sound (inaudible to humans) produced by a vibrating of their foreheads. Elephants can pick up infrasound over distances of several miles.
14. Elephants have enormous appetites and eat up to 300kg (630lbs) of food every day.
15. Elephants have very inefficient digestive systems and only digest about 40% of their food.
16. Elephants have one of the longest lifespans in the animal kingdom and live almost as long as human beings.
17. Elephants can run at up to 38 km per hour (24mph) over short distances.
18. The gestation period of an elephant is up to 22 months.
19. Elephants are one of the few animals on earth that use tools.
20. Elephants grieve for dead companions something that it virtually unknown in other animals.
21. The survival of elephants on planet earth is under severe threat particularly the Asian elephant which is listed as critically endangered with less than 50,000 still remaining.
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Elephant Facts ... Did You know ?
Elephants stomp when they walk.
Elephants sleep standing up.
Sometimes baby elephants lie down to sleep.
Elephants bathe. Sometimes the spray dirt on themselves to get the parasites off. Sometimes they bathe in mud
Elephants live in herds.
They cool off by fanning their ears. This cools the blood in their ears. That blood goes to the rest of their body and cools off the elephant.
They poop 80 pounds in one day.
Elephants weigh 10,000 pounds. It would take 250 students to add up to 10,000 pounds.
They collect food with their trunks.
Only grown up ladies and their babies live in the herds.
The daddy elephants leave the herd when they are 12 years old.
They fight with their tusks.
They eat grass and bark.
During the wet season they eat things low to the ground.
During the dry season they use their trunk to gather food from trees and bushes.
They suck up water into their trunks and shoot it into their mouths.
Elephants need lots of room to roam and eat. (Some of us think that this must mean they are not happy in the zoo or in the circus.)
They can run 24mph for short distances.
If yuo had waited 5 more seconds you would have posted that at 22:23:24. o well, nice. I knew some of this stuff.
I love elephants! Very cool facts.