A triangular artifact crafted from elephant bone was used by archaic human relatives to sharpen hand axes around 480,000 years ago in what is now the U.K., a new analysis reveals.

The item — which measures about 4.3 by 2.3 inches (10.9 by 5.8 centimeters) — represents the oldest known elephant bone tool ever found in Europe, according to the study, which was published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Science Advances, and demonstrates human relatives' high level of resourcefulness and ability to adapt to new environments as they settled in northern climates.

While evidence suggests that early human relatives used elephant bones and tusks throughout the Paleolithic period for a wide range of purposes, it's "very rare" to find an elephant-bone tool of this age or older anywhere in the world, said study co-author Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

The "unexpected" find of one of the world's oldest elephant bone tools indicates a relatively advanced level of technological development, thus highlighting the innovation, resourcefulness and craftsmanship of archaic human relatives almost half a million years ago, the researchers said in the study.

While the researchers are unsure which group of human relatives used the elephant tool, given the age of the tool and the location where it was found, two candidates are early Neanderthals or Homo heidelbergensis, Bello told Live Science in an email.

The tool "provides an extraordinary glimpse into the ingenuity of the early human ancestors who made it," Bello said.

The fossilized bone artifact was originally uncovered in the early 1990s during excavations at the archaeological site of Boxgrove in southern England. This internationally renowned site has yielded many finds that have shed light on Paleolithic life around half a million years ago. These include various bone and stone tools, numerous animal remains displaying signs of butchery, and even the oldest human remains ever found in Britain.

The significance of the bone artifact was not immediately apparent. But a recent analysis of the artifact conducted by Bello and her co-author Simon Parfitt, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, revealed that the artifact represents an elephant bone fragment deliberately shaped into a "retoucher" tool.

Retouchers were used to shape and resharpen the edges of hand axes. The elephant bone retoucher would have contributed to the production of the "finely worked" hand axes that were thought to have been used primarily as cutting tools and are typical of Boxgrove, according to the study.

"The elephant bone tool shows signs of being shaped and used to knap and re-sharpen lithic tools while the bone was still fresh, suggesting that these humans knew that elephant bone was a great material for this," Bello said.

The find represents the only documented case of elephant bone being used to make a retoucher, according to the researchers. Knapping tools made from organic materials such as bone, antler and wood were essential pieces of equipment for early humans but are rarely preserved in the archaeological record.

Furthermore, prehistoric elephant bone remains are "exceptionally rare" at Boxgrove, suggesting that archaic humans in the area came across this resource infrequently, the study authors noted. Nonetheless, it appears that the creators of the tool recognized the usefulness of the material.

"This remarkable discovery showcases the resourcefulness of our ancient relatives," Parfitt told Live Science in an email. "They possessed not only a deep knowledge of the local materials around them, but also a sophisticated understanding of how to craft highly refined stone tools."

"Elephant bone would have been a rare but highly useful resource, and it's likely this was a tool of considerable value," he said in a statement.

Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?

Elephants are known for their intelligence, complex social behavior, memory and size, including their giant ears. The ears of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can grow up to 6.6 feet (2 meters) long and 4 feet (1.2 m) wide, while Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) have slightly smaller and rounder ears.

That’s about 17% of their body length, which means that while they’re the animal with the largest ears, they’re not actually the one with the largest ears relative to the size of their body. That award goes to the long-eared jerboa (Euchoreutes naso), but it's still impressive to have 6-foot-tall ears.

So why are elephants' ears so big? There's a practical reason for their large size, experts told Live Science: It keeps elephants cool.

An animal that big generates a lot of heat, especially in the hot savannas, forests and grasslands where they live. But unlike humans, elephants don't really sweat, William Sanders, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in fossil elephants, told Live Science. Instead, they have very little body hair and "spectacular cooling devices" — massive ears filled with large blood vessels that help the giant animals thermoregulate.

"When the animal gets really warm, it can force blood into its ears, and then it'll flap them," said Advait Jukar, an assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Elephant ears have thin skin that is only millimeters thick and the blood vessels that pass through them are large, enabling elephants to move about 20% of their blood supply through their ears at any one time.

Related: Do 'elephant graveyards' really exist?

The larger the ears are, the more surface area they have to release heat into the surrounding air. Because the blood flowing through them is warmer than the air, the heat dissipates into the elephant's surroundings. Cooler blood then circulates back into the body, helping to reduce the animal's overall temperature, Jukar told Live Science. The animals can expand or constrict their blood vessels depending on whether it's cool or hot, which helps regulate their temperature

According to Jukar and Sanders, the fossil record supports this idea. Mammoths, which are relatives of modern elephants, first evolved in Africa. As they began moving into colder climates, their ears gradually became smaller, Jukar said.

"We know from mummified woolly mammoths in Siberia, for example, that they have very small ears compared to savanna African elephants," Sanders explained. "It was more important that they had fur, right? They were woolly for a reason, and it's to maintain their body heat. So it's the other way around."

While elephants likely have their big ears to keep themselves cool, their ears also have other uses. Some studies suggest that elephants use their ears to funnel sound waves, which can help them hear lower-frequency sounds. Elephants can also detect low-frequency vibrations through their feet, which have receptors called Pacinian corpuscles that can conduct the vibrations through their bodies. So, with their feet and massive ear bones combined, elephants can communicate over dozens of miles.

Their large ears help the highly social animals communicate with each other, Sanders said.

"They can't signal by waving their paws around, so they have to signal in other ways,” he said. Elephants that are going to charge will bring their ears forward and start moving them rapidly to appear larger, for example.

"That's a sign that they're really pissed off. And that's the time when you should be putting your car in reverse or should be vacating the area very quickly," he added.

Elephant quiz: Test your smarts on the world's largest land animal

Rare footage captures the moment elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park formed a protective ring around their calves as a 5.2 magnitude earthquake wobbled Southern California yesterday morning (April 14).

One of the zoo's cameras caught three older elephants (Ndlula, Umngani and Khosi) attempting to shield two 7-year-old calves (Zuli and Mkhaya) from potential danger, The Associated Press reported.

"Elephants have the unique ability to feel sounds through their feet and formed what [is] known as an 'alert circle' during the 5.2 magnitude earthquake that shook Southern California this morning," representatives from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park wrote in a Facebook post on Monday.

"This behavior, demonstrated here by Ndlula, Zuli, Mkhaya, Umngani, and Khosi, is a natural response to perceived threats that helps protect younger elephants and the herd as a whole," they added.

The earthquake struck 3 miles (5 kilometers) south of Julian in San Diego County — around 33 miles (53 km) west of the zoo — at 10:08 a.m. local time on Monday, according to the United States Geological Survey. There haven't been any reports of injuries or damage to property as a result of the quake.

Related: Elephants say 'hello' to friends by flapping their ears and making little rumbly noises

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) live in tight-knit social groups based around a lead female, or matriarch. Their enormous size means that elephants have few natural predators in the wild. However, lions, hyenas, and crocodiles may attempt to take down young or sick members of the herd, according to The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore.

If the matriarch detects a predator, she will herd the offspring together as the adults form an outward-facing circle like the one seen in the footage from San Diego Zoo. The ring is designed to keep the young safe by placing adults between them and predators. The elephants may also use this circle to assess potential dangers, such as an earthquake.

Once in a circle, "they sort of freeze as they gather information about where the danger is," Mindy Albright, a curator of mammals at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, told The Associated Press.

In San Diego, the female calf, Mkhaya, stayed in the center of the circle, while the male calf, Zuli, stood on the edge. Albright said that was because Zuli wanted to show his courage and independence.

Khosi, one of the older elephants who helped raise Zuli, repeatedly tapped Zuli on the back with her trunk, and even on the face, as if patting him to say, "things are OK," and "stay back in the circle," according to Albright.

San Diego Zoo Safari Park representatives noted that the elephants resumed their normal daily activities after the earthquake had passed, though they remained in close proximity to one another.

"After this morning's shake up, the [elephants] returned to business as usual and are safe along with the rest of the crew at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance," representatives wrote.

According to legend, when an elephant knows it's nearing the end of its days, it will return to a specific place to die among the remains of its kin, and over time, these remains will form "elephant graveyards" that tower with tusks and skulls.

The idea is so powerful that it has made its way into popular culture, such as in Disney's "The Lion King," where haunting images of an elephant cemetery seared themselves onto the minds of a generation of children. Such graveyards hint at the tantalizing prospect that elephants might understand and anticipate their own mortality. But do these places really exist, and do elephants know when they are about to die?

In Africa and elsewhere, there are rare instances when a large number of elephant carcasses are found in a relatively confined area, said Leanne Proops, an associate professor of animal behavior and welfare at the University of Portsmouth whose research looks at death-related behaviors in animals. But in these occasional cases, the pile of carcasses has been linked to drought, large-scale poaching, geological forces or toxic algal blooms in water holes, which have been found to poison hundreds of elephants in one go.

What researchers have been unable to show is that these graveyards form because elephants intentionally traveled there to die, Proops told Live Science. "I can see where that myth or idea could have come into popular culture," she said, but that's exactly what it is: a myth, she said.

Akashdeep Roy, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, agreed. "I'd be very cautious about using the term 'graveyard,'" he said. "The idea of a graveyard that persists is largely a myth fueled by locals and hunters."

Related: Do elephants really 'never forget'?

Do elephants bury their dead?

That doesn't mean elephants have no understanding or emotional experience of death. In fact, Roy's own research opens up another angle on that question, with the possibility that elephants bury their kin. In a 2024 study, Roy and colleagues documented five cases in India's North Bengal region where baby Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) had been found almost completely buried in muddy drainage ditches at separate sites on tea estates, with only their legs protruding from the soil.

The burials seemed strategic, according to Roy. The trench environment would have enabled the adult elephants to place the infants into the ditch and then scoop earth over their bodies. "The elephants buried the carcasses physically without using any tools," Roy said. "I am as confident as an elephant is in locating water sources and paddy fields. There were elephant footprints all [around] the carcass, and … it's not very difficult for elephants to level the soil over a trench."

Locals in North Bengal and neighboring Assam have found several other burial sites beyond the five Roy and colleagues documented in their paper, and village elders accept elephant burials as established knowledge, he noted. Similar scenarios have been observed in African elephants (Loxodonta), in which dead elephants have been found covered in branches and leaves.

Proops said there could be other explanations for why the calves ended up buried and cautioned that without firsthand observation of the elephants doing so, we can't be sure the burials were intentional.

"I guess the reason we're interested in it is because we want to know whether this shows they understand death," Proops said. "It's very hard to interpret, particularly when it is a rare event. For me, I don't think we can really confirm whether it's a burial, in the sense that it has this sort of cognitive meaning to it."

While questions may linger around this facet of elephant behavior, they show several other intriguing death-related practices. Asian elephants have been observed carrying dead infants for hours or days and are known to stand vigil around the bodies of deceased herd members. Studies also document elephants showing signs of distress when dealing with dead or dying elephants; in Roy's research, the elephants associated with the burials were recorded trumpeting for almost an hour when they were in the area.

"We felt that [they were mourning], but it's always difficult to anthropomorphize such behavior in a natural science journal," Roy said. "Hindu people in India revere elephants as living gods — Shiva and Ganesha — and value elephant subjectivity."

Related: Do animals grieve?

Scientists have also documented several cases in which elephants have turned up at the site of a carcass and interacted with it, curiously touching and sniffing its bones. In fact, this research showed that African elephants that were presented with the bones of several species showed more interest in the skulls and tusks of other elephants of their own species. The finding suggests that they recognize their own species in death, and that judging by the physical signs of excitement the elephants showed in the presence of the bones, that these remains elicit an emotional response, the study authors suggest.

This idea is especially tantalizing because it seems to echo the kind of reflection that humans would show in a graveyard, "a place where the dead reside, and where we actually go out of our way to visit them as well," Proops said. However, the evidence for that conclusion comes up short; in general, the research shows that elephants don't make intentional pilgrimages to commune with these carcasses. Cases where elephants do encounter dead kin seem to occur when they randomly stumble upon a pile of bones; there is no evidence of planned behavior.

"What we really need is GPS data, where we look at normal patterns of movements in the elephants and we see them obviously deviating from those normal routes to go and visit a particular carcass," Proops said.

The truth is that we don't know if elephants understand that they're going to die one day. "There really is no strong evidence that other species do understand that," Proops said.

Elephants are Earth's largest land mammals, and with their trunks, tusks and giant ears, they're among the most recognizable and iconic animals alive today.

Known for their extraordinary intelligence, elephants are recognized as some of the world's most empathic creatures, working together in close-knit communities to help one another. They are even known to grieve and bury their dead.

But how much do you know about these giants? Take our quiz to find out. If you need a hint, tap the lightbulb in the top right corner.

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Most animal societies are run by males, but for some, it's the females that rule.

These matriarchal groups are usually led by the oldest and wisest individuals. Female leadership has mostly evolved in mammals, which tend to live longer and have fewer offspring than other types of animals. Animals with female leaders are those where females have a disproportionate influence on the collective behavior of group members, according to a 2020 study in the journal The Leadership Quarterly.

Female leadership takes a variety of forms. Females of some species, such as bonobos and spotted hyenas, rule by forging alliances and coordinating attacks against males, while others, like African savanna elephants and orcas, dominate through their wisdom.

So, without further ado, here are six examples of animals with female bosses.

African savanna elephants

The African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) is the largest elephant species and the biggest terrestrial animal on Earth. According to WWF, these elephants roam across sub-Saharan Africa in family units composed of around 10 females and their young. Often, these family units join to form "clans" of several hundred elephants that are headed by a single female matriarch. This leadership role is usually assigned to the oldest and most experienced female of the group.

The matriarch makes decisions about where the herd goes, how to respond to threats and crises, and when and where to settle down to sleep. She also leads the elephants to food and water, which is no small task, given that African savanna elephants require around 300 pounds (140 kilograms) of vegetation and up to 50 gallons (190 liters) of water per day to maintain their humongous size.

Related: Elephants say 'hello' to friends by flapping their ears and making little rumbly noises

But the matriarch's wisdom and authority do not necessarily make her an autocrat, according to the nonprofit organization Elephant Voices. Other members of the group can make suggestions and influence where the elephants move to, for example. There can also be conflict between females, and this sometimes bubbles over when the matriarch dies and leaves behind a power vacuum.

Male African savanna elephants associate with female-led herds only during the mating season.

Spotted hyenas

The spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) is a highly social and intelligent species. Like African savanna elephants, spotted hyenas hang out in female-led clans that can include anywhere between six and 90 hyenas. Female spotted hyenas aren't much bigger than their male counterparts, but they are far more aggressive and may therefore wield more power. Females also have a pseudopenis — an elongated clitoris that is so large, it looks like a penis — and lack a vaginal opening, meaning they look almost identical to males. As a result of their anatomy, female spotted hyenas have total control over who they mate with. When they choose to mate, females retract their pseudopenis to form an opening into which males can insert their penis.

Female spotted hyenas assert their dominance through aggressive behaviors, as well as by banding together, research has shown. Females receive much more social support in hyena clans than males do, meaning females are more likely to command and "win" interactions between the two sexes. Disparities in social support arise because male spotted hyenas leave their natal clan when they reach puberty. The social bonds they create when they join a new clan are weaker than those of females that have grown up together. 

Orcas

Orcas (Orcinus orca), also known as killer whales, are one of the ocean's top predators. They live in matriarchal societies, with separate pods made up of a female, her offspring and her offspring's offspring. Pods consist of a few to more than 20 male and female orcas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Several pods may join together in big groups to socialize, hunt or mate — but eventually, orcas always return to their natal pods.

Orcas rely on fellow pod members for survival. For example, killer whales were observed catching food to feed a pod member that was missing two fins, the Daily Mail reported. But it's the females that do the heavy lifting: Orca mothers often look after their sons well into adulthood by hunting for them and guiding them around, even if it affects the mother's chances of reproduction. Older females are also responsible for leading the pod to food and for teaching their young new skills that help them survive.

Related: Orcas 'attacking' boats are actually just bored teenagers having fun, experts say

Orcas are one of just a handful of species that go through menopause, which frees up time for older females to care for their grandchildren. Research has shown that a grandmother's care significantly increases the survival of her grandkids and that the death of a grandmother, on the other hand, leads to increased mortality in these youngsters. The evolution of menopause in killer whale societies also guarantees that there is no competition for mates between older and younger related females. 

Bonobos

Bonobos (Pan paniscus), together with chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are our closest living relatives. Bonobos live in large social groups composed of males and females, but unlike chimp groups, bonobo communities are led by females. Females resolve conflicts through sexual contact. To console the victim of a fight, for example, a female embraces the victim and swings her hips from side to side to make genital contact. Sexual contact is thought to regulate stress in bonobos and to alleviate tension among members of the group so that they can cohabit peacefully.

Female bonobos disperse when they reach sexual maturity and emigrate to new groups, while males stay in their natal group. In their new groups, females use sex to quickly form strong social bonds with unrelated — and often higher-status — females. They nurture these bonds throughout their lives and use them to orchestrate attacks against males. By asserting their dominance in this way, female bonobos secure their access to high-quality food, which boosts their reproductive success, and deter unwanted sexual behavior from males.

Honeybees

Honeybees (Apis) are famously led by a single adult queen. These bees live in giant colonies of tens of thousands of female workers that build the nest, forage for food and look after the brood. Workers are sexually underdeveloped and don't lay eggs. Only the queen can reproduce, and she does so with the help of several hundred male "drones" that join the colony only through late spring and summer. Drones have no stinger, wax glands or pollen baskets; their main purpose is to fertilize the queen's eggs, after which they drop dead, according to the University of Delaware.

Related: Do bees really die if they sting you?

A honeybee queen guarantees the survival of the colony by laying up to 250,000 eggs per year and possibly more than 1 million in her lifetime, according to the University of Delaware. (Queens can live up to five years.) She is also responsible for maintaining the colony by producing a pheromone that unifies the hive and gives it an individual "identity," which keeps her workers loyal. To perform her duties and in return for her hard work, the queen needs constant attention and a steady supply of royal jelly — a nutritionally dense, milky substance produced by female workers. The number of eggs the queen lays depends on the amount of food she receives and on her workers building wax cells for her eggs.

Lemurs

Several lemur species have female leaders. In ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), which live in mixed social groups of up to 25 individuals, females may dominate because they need first dibs on food to reproduce successfully. Females behave aggressively toward both males and females when they compete for food, but males are more submissive, meaning females come out on top.

Female lemurs consistently win conflicts with males, but the reasons for this are still unclear. Lemurs are monomorphic, meaning that males and females grow to similar sizes and broadly look the same, but males appear to feel threatened by females nonetheless. High-ranking males, especially, would rather skip a meal than fight hungry females. By avoiding antagonistic interactions with females, these males may improve their chances of reproducing. 

When elephants reunite with friends, they greet each other with ear flaps, rumbles and other deliberate sounds and gestures, new research shows.

The study, which was published May 9 in the journal Communications Biology, suggests that elephants are communicating intentionally and that they tailor their greeting depending on what other elephants are doing. For example, when another elephant was already paying attention, elephants were more likely to use visual gestures; otherwise, they were more likely to use touch. 

"For me, it was really exciting to finally do this, to finally understand how they use their bodies to communicate," study lead author Vesta Eleuteri, a graduate student at the University of Vienna, told Live Science. "It's just mind blowing that they do rely on it so much, but it's so overlooked."

Scientists already knew that elephants communicate from up to miles away using deep rumbles that are too low for humans to hear but that their species' massive ears pick up with ease. And their long trunks come with an excellent sense of smell: Elephants can sniff out age, kinship and even social groups — among both elephants and people. Compared with humans, though, elephants' eyesight is relatively poor. 

Related: 'They are very well aware of their agency': Elephant calf burial ritual discovered in India

Previous elephant communication research has tended to focus on sound and smell separately, Eleuteri said, rather than on how those and other senses might work together. 

Eleuteri and her team took a different approach, counting visual gestures — such as ear flapping and trunk reaching — along with vocalizations, touches and scent-related behaviors. They tracked which gestures and sounds occurred together, noting that low rumble noises often accompanied ear flapping — this combination was the most common greeting they documented. The recurring combination suggested the elephants wanted to communicate, Eleuteri said. The elephants also usually looked at each other before gesturing, further reinforcing that idea.

"This paper is unique in how seriously it tackles the concept of multi-modal communication," meaning communication that involves multiple senses at once, said Robbie Ball, who studies comparative cognition at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and was not involved in the study. 

"Just like I might wave my hand and yell 'Hey!' at my friend across the street, elephants appear to also combine appropriate communications signals for when they are greeting their friends," Ball told Live Science. 

For years, researchers had documented a cacophony of greeting behaviors when groups of elephants came together. It just wasn't clear which behaviors, if any, were intended as communication and which were unthinking. To answer that question, the researchers in the new study worked with a group of nine semi-wild elephants in Zimbabwe, separating them for 10 minutes at a time and then bringing them back together in order to observe their greetings. 

Elephants only tend to greet other elephants that they know and like, so an important first step was to figure out which elephants in the group were already close. Elephant caretakers already had some sense of the elephants' social dynamics. To quantify them, they used a proxy for elephant friendship: the "nearest neighbor index." Twice a month, elephant carers checked to see which elephants were standing closest to each other. They eventually chose to study six elephants that were closely bonded.

The study emphasizes that elephants live in complex social worlds, with family groups separating, coming together and keeping track of complex relationships over time. 

"They have long lives like humans. They can live up to 70 years and they have a similar trajectory," Eleuteri said. 

She suggested that having many social partners could push animals to develop complex communication. 

For millennia, grey wolves prowled North America, living in harmony with the natural world around them. But as the human population grew across the continent, farmers and ranchers, fearing these clever hunters would prey on their livestock, hunted and killed these majestic animals in their thousands. In 1926, a shot rang out over Yellowstone Park, and with it the last of the native grey wolves, who once roamed this spectacular wilderness, was dead.

The consequences of these actions spread much further than anyone had imagined, with elk, no longer fearing a natural predator, overrunning the landscape and leaving it barren, while emboldened coyotes fed on the smaller animals that would once have sustained other predators.  

But Yellowstone today is different. It has at least eight packs of wolves that run freely across the park, all thanks to the rewilding efforts to bring them back to where they once lived, and restore a natural order to the environment.

This remarkable tale is one of 20 beautifully illustrated stories that are perfect for young children in the new book "Rewild the World at Bedtime" by Emily Hawkins and illustrator Ella Beech, in which we discover how humans have worked with nature to bring animals back to the lands where they once lived. 

In this excerpt, we learn how the war that engulfed the nation of Mozambique decimated the wildlife of the Gorongosa National Park, and the remarkable efforts to bring elephants and other African fauna back to this beautiful landscape. 

As the red sun drops toward the horizon, a herd of elephants gather by a lake, their reflections mirrored in the calm water. On the far side of the pool, a jeep approaches across the dusty savannah. The driver is a young woman called Dominique: a scientist whose job is to learn about and protect these majestic beasts. She switches off the engine and reaches for her binoculars. 

Dominique watches as the leader of the herd flaps her ears, raises her trunk, and lets out a bellow of alarm. This wise mother elephant is protective of her family, and is wary of people. She has a long memory. She remembers a time not so many years ago when this place, Gorongosa, was a battleground. 

In the 1960s, Gorongosa National Park thrummed with wildlife. People came from across the globe to gaze at lions and leopards, rhinos and elephants. This vast landscape was a paradise of lush green flood plains, grassy savannahs, wetlands, woodlands, and mountains. 

But then, a dark shadow fell across the land. In the 1970s, the country of Mozambique was torn apart by a devastating civil war, which raged for sixteen years. The fighting spread into the park as the land was claimed first by one side, then the other. The war took a toll on the wildlife. Zebra and wildebeest were hunted for their meat, while elephants were killed for their valuable tusks, which were sold to buy weapons and supplies. 

When the war finally ended, the park was unrecognizable. Roads had been destroyed, buildings had been reduced to rubble, and the ground was littered with the bones of lost creatures. Most of Gorongosa’s large animals had died.

Where once there had been more than two thousand elephants, now there were fewer than two hundred. The buffalo had vanished, and the rhinos, leopards, and lions had been wiped out. The landscape had changed too. Without the grazing animals, the grasses had grown tall and a thorny shrub had taken hold, sprawling across the plains in dense thickets. 

But now that the fighting was over, both the people and the wildlife could begin to heal. The managers of the park tried to unite the local community, hiring ex-soldiers from both sides of the war as park rangers. They patrolled the savannahs, scaring off poachers and removing the deadly traps and snares left behind. Nature breathed a sigh of relief and, gradually, the wildlife began to return. However, the recovery was slow and the park was short of money to fix its problems.

In 2004, an American businessman called Greg Carr visited Mozambique. He had made a fortune in computer software, and he wanted to give back to a good cause. Greg fell in love with Gorongosa, and invested millions of dollars in helping the park recover. With his support, the park had enough money not only to bring back the animals, but also to build schools and provide healthcare and jobs for the people who lived in and around Gorongosa. 

Over the next few years, many different plants and animals returned to the area, and scientists were hired to research these varied species. One of the new staff was Dominique. She had been born in the nearby city of Beira just as the war was ending. She’d grown up with a love of science, and had studied ecology and conservation at university. When Dominique heard about the exciting work taking place at Gorongosa, she knew that she had to be part of it. She landed a job on the scientific team, and she is now an expert on the park’s elephants.

These mighty creatures are crucial to Gorongosa's recovery. With their lumbering bodies and powerful trunks, they transform landscapes. As a herd passes through, they munch on tall grasses and chomp at thorny shrubs, making space for antelopes and other grazers. But, as Dominique would learn, although the elephant population is recovering, there are still challenges to face. Part of her job is to find ways for humans and elephants to live alongside each other happily. 

Sometimes these creatures come into conflict with the people who live nearby. On Gorongosa’s southern border is a river that the elephants occasionally cross, visiting farms to raid and trample the crops. To solve this problem, staff and local people put up fences made from roped-together beehives to protect the farms. If the elephants disturb the fence, the bees become agitated and sting them, until they back off. These clever hives, as well as keeping the elephants away, provide the farmers with honey to eat and sell. Projects like this, where both the wildlife and the human communities benefit, are vital to Gorongosa.  

Today, as Dominique watches the herd cooling off at the lake, she is filled with hope for the future. In the thirty years that have passed since Mozambique’s civil war ended, much has changed for the better. Wildlife populations in Gorongosa have rebounded, local people are happier, and this vibrant place is now home to a breathtaking variety of animals and plants, as well as a close-knit community of people who are dedicated to taking care of them.  

Rewild the World at Bedtime by Emily Hawkins, illustrated by Ella Beech © Wide Eyed Editions, 2024

Ancient humans quarried flint to make weapons for hunting and butchering elephants up to 2 million years ago in what's now the Upper Galilee region of Israel, a new study finds.

The research answers long-standing questions about why there were so many ancient quarries in the region, and found that they were located near water sources likely used by migrating elephant herds.

The study authors propose that Homo erectus — an early ancestor of modern humans that lived from about 1.89 million to 110,000 years ago — quarried flint at the sites to make tools for hunting and butchering elephants until about 500,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age.

"An elephant consumes 400 liters [105 gallons] of water a day, on average, and that's why it has fixed movement paths," study co-author Meir Finkel, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, said in a statement. "These are animals that rely on a daily supply of water, and therefore on water sources — the banks of lakes, rivers and streams."

The authors looked at the ancient migration routes of elephants — suggested by earlier studies that considered the landscape and fossilized bones — and found that they corresponded closely to the ancient quarry sites in the Upper Galilee region, according to the study published Feb. 21 in the journal Archaeologies.

The quarries are within walking distance of the major Paleolithic sites at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov and Ma'ayan Baruch in the Hula Valley, between the Sea of Galilee and Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon.

Related: Our mixed-up human family: 8 human relatives that went extinct (and 1 that didn't)

Sacred stone

The study authors noted that the prehistoric elephant hunters seemed to have considered the flint from particular outcrops especially suited for hunting their prey. Ancient humans even left offerings at these rock outcrops, while leaving neighboring outcrops untouched.

"Hunter-gatherers attribute great importance to the source of the stone — the quarry itself — imbuing it with potency and sanctity, and hence also spiritual worship," co-author Ran Barkai, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, said in the statement.

Barkai and his colleagues have studied the flint quarrying and toolmaking sites in the Upper Galilee region for nearly 20 years. Earlier studies had shown that elephants were the primary food source in the region for Homo erectus by comparing the location of the ancient human sites with the ancient elephant migration routes.

"In many instances, we discover elephant hunting and processing [butchering] sites at 'necessary crossings' where a stream or river passes through a steep mountain pass, or when a path along a lakeshore is limited to the space between the shore and a mountain range," Finkel said.

Because it was hard to preserve an elephant carcass, especially with nearby predatory animals, ancient humans wouldn't have had long to butcher a dead pachyderm. "Therefore, it was imperative to prepare suitable cutting tools in large quantities in advance and nearby," Finkel added.

To support their theory, the researchers applied their findings to those of early Paleolithic sites in Asia, Europe and Africa where elephants and mammoths were hunted and to later sites where other animals —  such as hippos, camels and horses — were the prey.

"It appears that the Paleolithic 'holy trinity' [water, prey animals and suitable stone] holds true universally: Wherever there was water, there were elephants, and wherever there were elephants, humans had to find suitable rock outcrops to quarry stone and make tools," Barkai said.

"It was tradition: For hundreds of thousands of years, the elephants wandered along the same route, while humans produced stone tools nearby," he said.

Scientists have made a stem cell breakthrough in elephants, which could mean researchers are one step closer to bringing back long-extinct woolly mammoths, the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences has announced.

In a statement shared with Live Science, Colossal's Woolly Mammoth team says it has successfully derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). iPSCs are cells that have been reprogrammed so they can give rise to any cell type in the body, meaning researchers will now be able to investigate the adaptations that differentiate woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) from their closest living relatives and test gene edits without having to take tissue from living animals.

"These cells definitely are a great benefit to our de-extinction work," Eriona Hysolli, the head of biological sciences and mammoth lead at Colossal Biosciences, told Live Science. What's crucial about them, Hysolli said, is that they can reveal the cellular and genetic processes behind features that helped woolly mammoths thrive in the Arctic. These features include shaggy hair, curved tusks, fat deposits and a dome-shaped cranium. 

iPSCs also open a path to creating elephant sperm and egg cells, which are essential for mammoth de-extinction, in the lab. With fewer than 52,000 Asian elephants left in the wild, according to WWF, harvesting cells from these animals would prove difficult and undesirable.

Previously, deriving elephant iPSCs proved challenging because these animals have a complex gene pathway not found in other species. The researchers overcame this by suppressing core genes called TP53 that regulate cell growth and prevent cells from duplicating indefinitely, Hysolli said.

Related: 'That's a huge amount of movement for a single mammoth': Woolly female's steps retraced based on chemistry of 14,000-year-old tusk

"One of the things that we had to overcome for elephant cells is that they do have this expansive TP53 pathway," Hysolli said. "We had to suppress this pathway via two means in order to get these iPSCs, so we had to go through a multistep process in order to achieve them."

The breakthrough may also shed light on early development in elephants, which is currently considered the biggest hurdle to woolly mammoth de-extinction. If researchers succeed in creating a woolly mammoth embryo by fusing ancient mammoth DNA with elephant cells, they will need to implant this embryo into an elephant surrogate to complete a 22-month gestation period. "Elephant gestation is so long and complex, so really understanding the developmental biology aspect of elephant biology is so important," Hysolli said. 

Engineering a woolly mammoth embryo no longer poses a huge challenge, Hysolli said, but birthing a healthy calf will take more time and work. The team is still researching alternative methods to generate elephant iPSCs and maturing the ones they have newly developed. The iPSCs breakthrough, which will be published on the preprint database bioRxiv, has yet to be peer-reviewed.

"There is more validation to be done, so until you do the experiment you can never be sure, but we think that the pluripotency potential [to differentiate into any cell type] is fully there," Hysolli said.

This is an important breakthrough and an essential step to create a woolly mammoth-like elephant, said Vincent Lynch, a developmental biologist and associate professor at the University at Buffalo in New York who was not involved in Colossal's work. "The goal, I think, is to turn these iPSCs into sperm and eggs, which would allow for in vitro fertilization and, eventually, surrogacy," Lynch told Live Science in an email. "Those methods are pretty challenging and haven’t been developed yet, but it is only a matter of time."

Reprogramming elephant cells into iPSCs has applications beyond woolly mammoth de-extinction, according to the statement. The technology could provide a boost to elephant conservation, for example, by enabling researchers to produce and fertilize reproductive cells artificially.

"We can derive gametes, so oogonia and spermatogonia-like cells, from these pluripotent stem cells," Hysolli said. "And that's crucial over the longer term, because they can really hold the key to saving species."

Asian elephants bury their calves with their legs poking out of the ground, researchers have observed. The calves were 1 year old or less and were transported to premade burials of sorts — irrigation drains on tea estates in India — by herd members, before being placed in holes and covered in soil.

In a study published Feb. 26 in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, researchers documented five calf burials among Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in the eastern Himalayan floodplains of northern West Bengal.

Researchers have previously observed African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) performing burial practices, in which herd members cover their deceased companions and family members with branches and leaves. The new study provides the first record of Asian elephant burials and is the first known case of elephants using soil in burials, as well as specifically positioning the body.

Parveen Kaswan, an officer with the Indian Forest Service, and Akashdeep Roy, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, spent 16 months reviewing literature relating to elephant burials and found five case reports that document this behavior.

Related: Asian elephant mom carries dead calf for weeks, new eye-opening videos reveal

They discovered the calf burials were highly organized: "They are very well aware of their agency," Roy told Live Science in an email. All calf deaths were natural, relating to respiratory failure or infection, post mortem analysis showed.

The elephants live in landscapes including fragmented forests, tea estates, agricultural lands and human settlements. Kaswan and Roy discovered the deceased elephant calves were carried by the trunk or legs over long distances,— in some cases traveling for 48 hours — to tea estates, where people had dug irrigation drains up to 26 inches (65 centimeters) deep.

The calves were placed on their backs, with their legs facing up, and herd members then pushed soil on top of the carcass and leveled the ground. The researchers believe this positioning relates to how the body is placed into the pit. "It is the most accessible position to hold and put the carcass into the drain," Roy said. "This is also the position where more than one herd member can participate in the burial process."

He added that the elephants may also prioritize the head being buried, and to avoid the carcass being eaten by a carnivore.

After the burial, tea estate managers and villagers heard the elephants roaring and trumpetting. Roy believes these vocalizations were to "express agony and pain and to pay homage to the deceased calves."

Researchers also discovered that after the burials, elephants would avoid the paths where the calves had been left — even when the route had previously been regularly used. Roy said this may have to do with the elephants associating the path with "bad memories/bad milestones/bad omens," and to pay homage to the deceased.

The burial behavior, Roy said, highlights elephants' extreme intelligence. "They selected tea estates on purpose because they couldn't bury the carcass in villages as there is high human disturbance, and neither could they do it inside the forest where there are no pre-built trenches and knowing their inability to dig big holes in this biogeographic zone," he said.

Heartwarming footage has captured a rare pink elephant playing with another calf in a waterhole in Kruger National Park, South Africa.

Elephants are typically gray, but this small calf, which belongs to the genus Loxodonta, has pink skin and fair hair, as a result of an inherited condition called albinism — a genetic disorder that stops the production of a molecule called melanin that is responsible for pigment in the eyes, hair and skin.

The rare condition "only occurs once in every 10,000 births" of wild mammals, Theo Potgieter, a safari operator who captured the image of the young elephant, said in an email to Live Science.

Related: Rarest of rare: 2 albino egg-laying mammals spotted in Australia

According to Potgieter, the elephant is estimated to be around 1 year old, with sightings reported of the young male since late last year. 

Albinism is a rare condition because it is recessive and only presents itself when both parents carry the mutated gene and pass it onto their offspring. 

The condition causes poor eyesight. The lack of pigment interrupts the development of the eyes, which can affect an animal's ability to forage for food or successfully track and hunt prey. The absence of coloured fur, scales or skin, meanwhile, means they often lose their ability to camouflage against their environment, making it harder to hide from predators or prey. 

In addition, previous research in catfish indicated that animals with albinism are sometimes ostracized by members of the same species, which can lead individuals to have a solitary existence.

However, in the same national park, Potgieter has seen albinism in an elephant calf before and said both calves were seemingly fully accepted among the herd. "In both recent sightings of two different individuals, the rest of the herd seemed to be very protective and patient with the presence of these young individuals," said Potgieter. 

"It is always a privilege to be able to witness these extremely rare and special animals," Potgieter said.

Animals come in all shapes and sizes, and many have iconic features that make them memorable. From the long necks of giraffes to the oddly shaped heads of hammerhead sharks, here's how 10 remarkable animals evolved their signature features.

Related: How long do new species take to evolve?

1. Turtle shells

For years, scientists debated how turtle shells evolved. According to a report published in the journal Current Biology, paleontologists once believed that the shell was formed through the fusion of osteoderms — bony deposits that make up the protective scales on crocodiles and armadillos. But developmental biologists disagreed with this theory, given how the embryos of modern day turtles develop. Instead, they believed the ribs underneath turtle ancestors' bodies fused and gradually united over the body to form the shell.

The debate wasn't settled until 2008, when Chinese scientists discovered the fossil of Odontochelys semitestacea, whose name means "half shelled turtle with teeth." Although the fossilized animal's shell was incomplete, it had no osteoderms and showed widening of the ribs, confirming the developmental biologists' theory. Scientists say it represents an intermediate step in the evolution of the turtle shell. The later stages of evolution are shown in fossils of the genus Proganochelys.

2. Giraffes' long necks

Giraffes' necks can be up to 10 feet (3 meters) long, allowing the animals to reach leaves high up in trees. But they didn't always have this impressive feature.

Discokeryx xiezhi is a sheep-size, ancient relative of modern day giraffes that lived around 17 million years ago during the the early Miocene epoch (23 million to 5.3 million years ago). It had a stumpy neck and a disk-shaped, thick skull. Scientists in 2022 proposed that the thick skulls of D. xiezhi evolved to withstand massive blows to the head during fights between males. Those same bouts fueled the growth of their necks to aid in fighting. This is called the "necks for sex" hypothesis and suggests competition led to longer necks developing. Males who won fights more often passed these genes onto their offspring than did the losers, eventually leading to the giraffes we see today.

3. Elephant tusks

Elephants have deeply rooted tusks protruding from their mouths that grow continuously. These tusks are actually enormous teeth that give the pachyderms an evolutionary advantage when digging, lifting objects, stripping bark of trees and protecting themselves.

The earliest known tusks are found in Dicynodonts, a group of stocky, pig-like herbivores that lived 270 million years ago and had unique pointed beaks with protruding teeth on either side.

Members of this clade with true tusks were also missing several teeth. Researchers theorized that it may have been more energetically favorable to develop tusks that continuously grow, rather than replacing teeth that may have fallen out. They also suggested that the tusks evolved independently in different populations over time. When the tusks developed, soft tissue ligaments formed, anchoring the large teeth to the jaw.

4. Blue whales' gigantic size

Blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) are the biggest animals to have ever lived. Their size makes it hard to believe the mammoth sea mammals evolved from a dog-sized ancestor, Pakicetus. According to a 2016 study in the journal Biology Letters, the size of baleen whales, including the blue whale, grew significantly over the last 5.3 million years.

One of the main reasons for this accelerated growth is the filter-feeding behavior of baleen whales, which use bristle-like teeth to sieve plankton from the ocean. This somewhat "passive" feeding strategy is tied to a highly efficient metabolism which allows the whales to conserve large amounts of energy while traveling long distances.

Researchers believe the explosive growth of baleen whales started in the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). Nutrient dense runoff from the ice spilled into the ocean, creating dense patches of plankton and krill. The high productivity of the ocean combined with the low energy-using whales drove a massive growth spurt in the animals, allowing them to reach the colossal sizes we see today.

5. Tigers' stripes

Tiger stripes vary between individuals, much like fingerprints in humans. The markings play an important role in helping a tiger remain hidden while hunting prey. The stripes help break up the shape of the animal's body, allowing it to blend in with tall grass.

In 1952, the British Mathematician Alan Turing theorized that a chemical reaction between two homogeneous substances were responsible for the famous tiger-stripe pattern, along with other patterns commonly found in nature. He dubbed these substances "morphogens." One acted as an "activator" and the other as an "inhibitor" — with the "activator" causing a stripe to form and the "inhibitor" creating a blank space.

In 2012, a study in the journal Nature Genetics experimentally validated this theory by identifying the morphogens at play in the formation of ridge patterns in the mouths of mice.

6. Head of a hammerhead shark

Hammerhead sharks famously have distinct hammer-shaped heads, with beady eyes at each end. Ancestors of the hammerheads alive today first appeared 20 million years ago.

It was assumed that the evolution of the hammer-head evolved from a 'normal shaped head', so from sharks with a more rounded head that gradually elongated over time into much larger sharks where the head is even more defined.

In 2010, a DNA analysis of eight species of hammerhead sharks alive today and of varying sizes revealed that ancestors of hammerheads were very large, around 6.5 feet (2 m) long. Scientists hypothesized that modern hammerheads' unusually shaped heads came from larger individuals and only later showed up in smaller bodied hammerheads, like the bonnethead (Sphyrna tiburo), as they evolved.

Few theories exist to explain the function of hammerheads' unusual head shape and why it evolved this way. Some suggest it improves maneuverability, helps the sharks capture prey and even may enhance their sense of smell. In a study published in December 2023 in the Journal of Experimental Biology, scientists showed that the sharks' wide heads give them better binocular vision, depth perception and stereovision than a slimmer-headed shark.

7. Rattlesnake rattle

The sound of a rattlesnake's tail sends chills down the spine of anyone that hears it. The noise-making rattle on the tail is made of hollow caps of keratin that loosely interlock, making sound when the snake shakes its tail.

In a2016 study in the journal The American Naturalist, scientists looked at 56 snake species from the families Viperidae (which includes rattlesnakes) and Colubridae (one of the largest snake families). When exposed to a possible threat, snakes from both families began shaking and vibrating the ends of their tails, suggesting a shared origin of this behavior. The species more closely related to rattlesnakes also shared similarities in the duration and rate of tail vibration.

The researchers behind this study suggested that this widespread snake behavior may have served as "the signal precursor to rattlesnake rattling behavior." Snakes that shook their tails fastest may have developed callus at the end of their tails to serve as a better warning signal to predators, with this eventually leading to the creation of the rattle.

8. Hummingbirds' long bills 

The smallest birds in the world, hummingbirds are known for their bright colors and long bills that help reach nectar in flowers. Hummingbirds split from swifts — insect-eating birds that have shorter and wider beaks — in Europe 42 million years ago. They then appeared in South America around 22 million years ago , having evolved a unique taste receptor for sweetness. They also developed a taste for nectar, according to a 2014 study published in the journal Science.

As a result, hummingbird bills evolved to better feed on different flower species, and competition boosted diversity in bill length and shape.

9. Lobster claws

Lobster-like crustaceans first appeared around 400 million years ago. The modern creatures have strikingly large, asymmetrical claws with the larger one being dominant, similar to how humans are either right-handed or left-handed.

Adult lobsters develop a cutter claw with fast fiber muscles that  can snap at a speed of 20 milliseconds to help tear and cut their food. Their other claw is a short and heavy crusher claw. The crusher claw muscle is made up of slow muscle fibers that can exert a powerful pressure of 100 pounds per square inch.

Juvenile lobster claws, on the other hand, are symmetrical and slowly change over time as the animals get bigger. The claws gradually change in response to how they are being used.

Clawed lobsters first showed left and right-handedness from the Early Triassic. Theories suggest that this adaptation helped lobsters pry open or crush shelled-creatures during the time of the Mesozoic Marine Revolution — a period of time between the Triassic (247.2 and 242 million years ago) and the end of the Cretaceous (66 million years ago) during which marine animals evolved new ways of preying on shellfish and there was increased competition for food between predators.

10. Pelican beak pouches

Pelicans are large water birds, known for their long beaks and large throat pouches that help them consume up to 4 pounds (1.8 kg) of fish per day. They scoop buckets of water, trapping the fish inside its beak.

How this handy tool evolved is a mystery because beak and bill fossils are rarely found from birds that lived in the Paleogene era (between 66 million and 23 million years ago). That changed in 2010, when the earliest known pelican fossil was found with an almost completely preserved beak. The pouches of the pelican have changed minimally over  the last 30 million years, the researchers found.

Pelicans can eat a massive amount of food thanks to their pouches, so the study authors think this is why they evolved.

Animals can often be unpredictable and surprise us with their unusual behavior, but some newsworthy critters take this even further, leaving scientists and the public completely baffled.

While the weird behaviors on this list are a testament to the complex brains of our furry, finned and fork-tongued friends, there's also a darker side to some of these acts. Humans continued to disrupt and destroy the natural world in 2023, putting many animals under pressure and causing some to act in weird ways. Here are 10 of the strangest animal behaviors documented in 2023.

Kangaroo tries to drown dog

In October, a man captured a video of a kangaroo as it tried to drown his dog. Mick Moloney had to rescue his dog Hutchy from the Murray River in Victoria, Australia, after a male eastern gray kangaroo (Macropus giganteus) held Hutchy's head underwater. Moloney got Hutchy to safety but took a punch from the kangaroo for his efforts.

This isn't the first time kangaroos have behaved this way around our canine companions, and the marsupial was probably just looking out for its own safety. Kangaroos have learned to hop into water to defend themselves against attacks from canines.

Crocodile has "virgin birth"

Researchers announced the first crocodile "virgin birth" in June. A female American crocodile  (Crocodylus acutus) laid a clutch of eggs at a reptile park in Costa Rica after being alone for 16 years. This form of asexual reproduction had never been documented in crocodiles before, although it's known to occur in lizards, snakes, birds and sharks.

The crocodile's clutch didn't hatch, but genetic analysis of a fetus within one of the eggs revealed it was almost identical to the mother. The study's authors noted that offspring born in this way often suffer abnormalities and don't survive.

Dolphins raid crab pots

Bottlenose dolphins were spotted stealing bait from fishers in western Australia. The dolphins used their noses and teeth to pilfer fish from nets meant for crabs. Wildlife conservationists filmed this behavior for the first time in 2023, revealing the different ways dolphins learned to open the fishers' pots.

"The most basic version is that the dolphin grabs the bait which sits on a hook or metal pin inside the crab pot," filmmaker Axel Grossmann told Live Science in November. "So essentially the dolphins pull the fish off the pin or break it down into edible pieces."

When fishers tried putting bait underneath the pots, the dolphins learned to flip them over, and when they tried using bait boxes, the dolphins learned to open them. Eventually, fishers and conservationists developed a dolphin-proof design.

Elephant peels banana

A zoo elephant taught herself to peel bananas by watching zookeepers. Pha, a female Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) at the Berlin Zoo in Germany, rips off the stem of a banana, pinches the frayed skin with her trunk and uses the fruit's weight to peel. It's an ingenious twist on the human method, which normally involves two hands and opposable thumbs.

Keepers at the zoo used to feed Pha peeled bananas when she was a calf, which is probably where she got the idea. Pha only peels ripe bananas with brown spots. She eats green and yellow bananas whole and rejects brown bananas. When fed in a group where her bananas might get stolen by other hungry elephants, she peels only her last banana, presumably to savor it.

Crocodiles save dog

Three mugger crocodiles (Crocodylus palustris) seemingly helped a young dog that had been chased into a river by a pack of feral dogs by nudging it to safety. The researchers who witnessed the event interpreted the crocodiles' actions as empathy. They also reported that the species appears to use sticks as bait to catch nesting birds and is attracted to flowers. However, an independent expert was skeptical of their findings.

"Crocodilians do have a sophisticated suite of behaviors," said Duncan Leitch, a biologist who specializes in the neurophysiology of reptiles at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Live Science in September. "But some of these conclusions are using a human definition of intelligence and trying to find that in crocodilians."

Whale kelping goes global

Researchers first documented humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) playing with seaweed in 2007, but the behavior, known as "kelping," is now so widespread, it's become a global phenomenon. Seaweed potentially acts as a body scrub for the whales, and they may use it to remove parasites, treat their skin or just play with it.

"It's something they do together as a social event or by themselves," Olaf Meynecke, a researcher at Griffith University's Coastal and Marine Research Centre in Queensland, Australia, told Live Science in September. "They put the seaweed on their head and roll around in it; they try to move it around with their pectoral fins as well."

Orca eats seven sea otters whole

In September, scientists described a beached orca (Orcinus orca) with seven intact sea otters in her belly. Orcas don't normally eat sea otters (Enhydra lutris) and typically chew the marine mammals they do eat, so researchers were puzzled why this orca gobbled down the sea otters whole.

To make matters even stranger, this killer whale was found on the coast of one of the Commander Islands in the Russian Far East, far from the orcas' normal range between the Gulf of Alaska and the coast of California. One of the sea otters was stuck between the orca's oral cavity and esophagus, which could have been the reason for the orca's demise.

Ants detect cancer in urine

In January, researchers discovered that ants can sniff out cancer using their antennae. Silky ants (Formica fusca) normally use the olfactory receptors in their antennae to find food or mates, but the researchers trained them to find tumors instead.

Once the ants learned to associate the urine of tumor-bearing rodents with sugar, the researchers found that the ants spent 20% more time next to urine samples from cancerous rodents than next to urine samples from healthy rodents. The ants could serve as cheap and efficient cancer detectors in the future, though much more science needs to be done first, the researchers said. Dogs can also learn to sniff out cancer, but researchers found that ants are easier to train.

Mice kill largest flying birds

Invading mice killed eight wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) — the world's largest flying birds — on a remote island between South Africa and Antarctica. The mice have been eating native seabird chicks on Marion Island for decades, but taking down adults is a new phenomenon — and it's worrying conservationists.

Humans inadvertently introduced house mice (Mus musculus) to the island in the 19th century after the rodents hitched a ride on ships. The island's native wildlife isn't equipped to defend itself against rodents because it didn't evolve alongside the mice. The Mouse-Free Marion project will try to use rodenticide to kill off the mice before they can do any further harm to wandering albatrosses and other threatened species that call the island home.

Orcas sink two boats

Orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar sank two boats in 2023 and attacked a number of others with ruthless efficiency. Why orcas have started attacking boats is an open question, but the behavior may stem from a traumatic experience, play, frustration or a temporary fad within the population. 

In the 1980s, an orca population in the Pacific went through a phase of carrying dead salmon on their heads for no obvious reason, so it's possible for orcas to pick up temporary behaviors and teach them to each other. The coordinated boat attacks are just one example of how orcas show their terrifying intelligence.

Elephants have astonishing trunks that are strong, dexterous and flexible. Now, scientists may have finally worked out how Earth's largest living land animals evolved their charismatic proboscises. 

Elephant trunks are marvels of evolutionary biology. They can be more than 6.5 feet (2 meters) long and have more than 40,000 individual muscles and nerve fibers. They are capable of lifting over 600 pounds (270 kilograms) but can carefully pick up a single peanut.

The exact environmental and biological pressures that led to the evolution of these trunks have long puzzled scientists, but a new preprint study, published Nov. 28 in the journal eLife reveals that climate-driven changes may explain part of the mystery.

Related: Elephants' giant, hot testicles could stop them getting cancer

Understanding the evolution of elephant trunks has always been challenging because the soft tissues of the trunk, like muscles and skin, do not fossilize well. This makes it difficult for scientists to find direct evidence of early forms of the trunk in fossil records.

Many long-trunked animals have long lower jaws, the scientists explained. But these long mandibles subsequently shorten after co-evolving with a trunk — though the link between the two is somewhat unclear.

In the new study, researchers compared three major families of elephant-like mammals in northern China that existed around 11 to 20 million years ago, investigating how the physiology of these groups differed depending on their feeding strategies and ecosystems. 

The groups included Amebelodontidae, Choerolophodontidae and Gomphotheriidae — three distinct lineages of gomphotheres, the ancestral group of living elephants.

The lead author of the study Chunxiao Li, a researcher at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Live Science that these ancient mammals were of particular interest because they all had long but "differentiated" mandibles, so could infer how it impacted trunk evolution.

Related: Watch an elephant peel a banana with her trunk in incredible first–of-its-kind footage

The team analyzed the tooth enamel of these three types of early elephant to glean new clues about their feeding habits and the environments they lived in.

They found that Choerolphontidae seemed to live in relatively closed environments like forests, while Amebelodontidae expanded into more open habitats, such as grasslands. Gomphotheriida appeared to have lived in habitats that were somewhere in between.

The scientists combined these findings with mathematical simulations of the jaw motion of these three extinct species. 

"Cherolophodon live in dense forests, so there are many plants that have horizontally extending branches," study co-author Shi-Qi Wang, professor at the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins at the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Live Science. 

Their jaws were suited to exerting pressure in up and down directions, rather than forwards or backwards, efficiently cutting through horizontal foliage. The researchers suggested their trunks were relatively primitive and clumsy. 

However, the jaws of both Gomphotheriida and Amebelodontidae, which lived in more open habitats, were more adapted to cutting vertically growing plants like soft-stemmed herbs and grasses. The nasal area of their skulls seemed to more closely resemble modern elephants, suggesting their trunks were capable of coiling or grasping actions that could help bring food directly to their mouths.

"We know that the whole paleo-environment changed [during this time] from warm and humid to colder, drier and open environments," Li said. "At that time, we see that these [early elephants] start using their long trunks to grab grasses."

This open-land grazing may have promoted the evolution of the trunks we see today, she said. It also provides clues as to why forest-dwelling animals like tapirs have trunks that are relatively feeble compared with elephants' trunks.

"We found why [early elephants] started to have such smart trunks… their trunks become stronger and more flexible, until finally, they start losing their long mandibles," Wang said.

Archaeologists in Turkey have unearthed an ornately carved 2,800-year-old elephant tusk in what may have once been an Iron Age "center of power."

The ivory carving features a mythical sphinx — a human head on the body of a winged lion — as well as a depiction of a real lion and two tall plants that may represent the mythical "tree of life." While the artwork dates to the Iron Age, it was found in an archaeological layer over a much older city — the deserted Bronze Age Hittite capital of Hattusa.

According to Andreas Schachner, an archaeologist with the German Archaeological Institute who has led excavations at Hattusa since 2006, the artifact shows that the Iron Age settlement at the site was an important place, although it was established after the Hittites had abandoned the city in about 1200 B.C., during what's known as the Late Bronze Age collapse.

"It is possible to say that this place was no longer a small town but a more important place, perhaps a center of power," Schachner told the Turkish state-owned Anadolu Agency.

Related: Enigmatic Anglo-Saxon ivory rings discovered in elite burials came from African elephants 4,000 miles away

The artifact is about 12 inches (30 centimeters) long and 4 inches (10 cm) wide, and Schachner said it may have been part of a piece of furniture.

"It was probably added as an ornament to a wooden box or furniture made of wood in its own time," he told the agency. "The work is broken on the right and left sides, and the upper and lower sides are in our original form. Therefore, it is possible to guess that it was longer."

Iron Age settlement

Schachner explained that the object was unique among finds at the Iron Age settlement built at the abandoned Hattusa site, which is now beside the Turkish village of Boğazköy (also spelled Boğazkale), about 90 miles (145 kilometers) east of Ankara.

"For the first time, we are faced with a work decorated with such a dense, beautifully rendered scene," he said. "Extensive excavations have been carried out at the Iron Age levels at Boğazköy, but we had not come across such a detailed artifact before."

He added that the symbols carved into the fragment might reveal relationships between the settlement and other contemporaneous cultures.

After scientific studies of the ivory carving are complete, it will go on display at the Boğazköy Museum, Schachner said.

Elephants are known for their impressive ears, tusks and trunks. For instance, they cool down by pumping hot blood through their large ears, which they then flap to dissipate the heat. As for their trunks, Asian elephants have one "finger" at the end of their trunk, while African elephants have two "fingers," which they can pinch together to grab small items, like fruit. 

Ross MacPhee, the curator emeritus of American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, has spent his life studying these majestic pachyderms and megafauna like them. With the Nov. 13 opening of "The Secret Lives of Elephants" exhibit at the AMNH, Live Science sat down with MacPhee to learn why the mammals' tusks are such a treasure trove of information, how their trunks are like noses and hands in one, and how male teen elephants are a lot like human ones.

Laura Geggel: I thought we would do a lightning round of cool facts about their ears, tusks and trunks. So let's start with ears. What are some facts about elephant ears?

Ross MacPhee: That those ears, especially in savanna elephants, are moving about 20% of the elephant's entire blood supply at any one time. And that's because they're radiators — they're heat radiators for the elephant. Elephants live in very hot conditions like Botswana or Namibia. Just because of their body mass [they] have the problem of needing to get rid of excess heat. That's what the ears do.

So whereas the skin of the elephant is the better part of three-quarters of an inch or more over most of the body, on the ears they're down to millimeters [thick]. And they have very large veins passing through them. And this is why they hold their ears out, why they flap them and that kind of thing. It all makes sense. It's a fanning kind of deal. In that way, they can substantially reduce their body temperature.

Related: Which animal has the largest ears?

LG: Next, let's do tusks.

RM: [Scientists measure the levels of isotopes, or different versions, of elements in elephant tusks,] and because the tusks grow throughout the life of an animal, you can go practically week by week through whatever proportion of the animal's life is represented in its tusk at death. And by sampling, you can determine to some extent what kinds of plants they were focusing on … You can determine when in the case of a female the female was pregnant because there's calcium carbonate deposited in that part of the tusk.

Another factoid, for the males, you can in some cases determine when they became sexually mature and were at that point driven out by the matriarch, because like human teenagers [the young males] don't know how to take care of themselves very well. So they have nutritional deficiencies for a while until they get with it and figure out where to go, where to eat, what to eat. You can detect that [through structural changes, not isotopes].

And then finally, and this is in its [own] way interesting and sad, if nutrition does have declines, then the ratio of the isotopes that you're looking at are going to change as well, as the animal goes into starvation mode.

LG: Veering off track, so in general the males live with the herd or live with their mom until they reach adolescence. And then they go off on their own, and they only come back to mate? Do they just live by themselves their whole lives?

RM: It varies in populations, it varies among the species. In the usual case for savanna elephants, males do live by themselves and come back when they're in musth [a rise in reproductive hormones] and ready to mate, that part is correct. But what you find … is that in Asian elephants there is recent evidence there's a kind of bachelor group, meaning all-male groups. It's not known if that's inherent in their behavior or because of problems with humans. Meaning that they are persecuted in one way or the other and they form these groups just to be with other elephants — because they can't be with the females in the herds, right?

How long these bands last, whether there's anything or function to them, is not really well understood — it's a recently studied phenomenon. What you can say is it varies. What you can say, in general, is that the males tend to be solitary.

LG: Let's do cool facts about the trunk.

RM: The thing that people know about the trunk is that elephants use the trunks in order to drink with. But in many other regards, this is an organ that is not unlike your hand. Meaning that in addition to being able to pick up very small objects, like individual leaves or cookies for zoo animals, they can also use the trunk to communicate with other elephants.

The elephants, if they know one another, have this kind of arrangement where they climb the trunks together on meeting. It's sort of like a handshake, there's no other way of describing it. It's "I recognize you, you recognize me. Hi, how are you?" That kind of deal. It's a social organ as well as a functional organ for drinking, for grabbing your food, that sort of thing.

And, of course, it is also the way that elephants sample smells in their environment. Here's a nice fact for you. Of all animals that have been tested genetically, as well as other ways, elephants have the most functional genes connected with olfaction — there's thousands of genes. It's amazing. Obviously canids and felids are up there, as well. The guy with the biggest nose also has the best sense of smell: it's remarkable. Because they have so many receptors, that means they're able to very finely discriminate in their environments about things to eat and also to sense what's going on.

It's really quite remarkable how functionally important the nose is. It's hard for a human to understand because our powers are so negligible in that regard.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

After the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck Earth about 66 million years ago, it took only a few million years for the earliest known elephant relative to emerge.

This was the dog-size Eritherium, the earliest known proboscidean, which lived around 60 million years ago in North Africa.

"But it didn't look anything like a modern elephant," Ross MacPhee, curator of "The Secret World of Elephants," a new exhibit opening Monday (Nov. 13) at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, told Live Science. "There were no big tusks and no large body size."

The 10-pound (4.5 kilograms) Eritherium is just one of the species highlighted in the exhibit, and one of more than 200 proboscidean species that have lived on Earth. Today, only three remain: the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana), the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus).

These modern elephants and their proboscidean cousins are the main attraction of the new exhibit. But a few iconic pachyderms steal the show, including a life-size model of a 4-foot-tall (1.2 meters) mama Sicilian dwarf elephant (Palaeoloxodon falconeri) and her very hairy calf, as well as a huge model of a molting woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius).

Related: 'It's really quite remarkable': An interview with elephant expert Ross MacPhee about the giant pachyderms

Proboscideans didn't always look like today's species; they reached modern sizes only around 40 million years ago, when the 2-ton (1.8 metric tons) Barytherium — which was outfitted with eight very short tusks, four on top and four below — arose.

And once they were big, some proboscideans shrank. These creatures often swam to, or got stranded on, islands. And due to the island effect — that small animals on islands tend to evolve into giant versions of their mainland relatives, and large animals tend to evolve into dwarf versions of their mainland relatives — they downsized. Over time, "they evolved smaller body size because you need less food, less water — it's easier to walk, so also for your joints, it's better" to be small, said Alexandra van der Geer, a paleontologist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands who served as a consultant for the exhibit and helped create the Sicilian dwarf elephant models.

Interestingly, the largest and smallest elephants on record came from the same genus: Palaeoloxodon. The largest elephant, P. antiquus — a 13-foot-tall (4 m), straight-tusked beast from Europe — likely swam to Sicily, where its descendants gave rise to the 98% lighter dwarf, P. falconeri.

Meanwhile, the earliest known mammoth (Mammuthus subplanifrons) evolved around 5 million years ago in South Africa. Woolly mammoths evolved about 800,000 years ago, when spreading into Eurasia and eventually North America. Again, due to the island effect, a "mini-mammoth" emerged on the Channel Islands off California. Thought to arise from a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi), the pygmy Mammuthus exilis stood about 5.5 feet (1.7 m) tall at the shoulders.

Many proboscideans went extinct at the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago. The reasons for this mass die-off aren't completely understood, but it's likely that both climate change and human hunters played a role, studies have found.

Today, research continues to reveal the secret world of elephants. For instance, DNA shows that their closest relatives aren't hippos or rhinos, which also have thick, gray skin, but rather manatees, dugongs, and furry, rabbit-size hyraxes.The "Secret World of Elephants" will run for at least a year at the AMNH before traveling the country.

Name a famous elephant. Babar, perhaps? Or Dumbo? Memorable though these monikers may be to humans, they sound nothing like the names elephants give each other. If you're an elephant, your name is something more like a low, rumbling sound, scientists say.

In a new paper published Aug. 23 on the preprint server BioRxiv, researchers found that   African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) made vocalizations specific to individuals in their social groups — and that the recipients responded accordingly. In short, elephants appear to have names for one another.

This makes them the first non-human animals to address each other in a manner that does not imitate the receiver's own call, as dolphins and parrots do. And while other animals do produce what are known as "referential calls" in order to identify objects just as predators or food, those calls are believed to be instinctive and do not require social learning.

Related: Chimps use military tactic only ever seen in humans before

In the new study, the team recorded 527 elephant calls in the greater Samburu ecosystem in northern Kenya and 98 calls in the Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya. The researchers then identified rumbles specific to 119 individuals by discerning which members of groups of female elephants and their offspring were separated from the herd at the time of each vocalization or approached when the call was made.

Using a computer model, the researchers correctly identified the receivers of 20.3% of the 625 recorded calls.

This marks a step forward in understanding how these highly intelligent animals communicate. 

"There's a contact rumble, there's an anti-predator rumble, there's a greeting rumble. If you look at a spectrogram, they all look almost exactly the same, or exactly the same," Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, an elephant biologist at Harvard University Medical School who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "That's why AI has been exciting. It allows us to really figure out what the elephants are honing in on." 

As it turned out, the calls were not generic sounds aimed at, for example, younger elephants or mothers. They were distinct to the receiver. Even calls from different callers to the same receiver were similar — though the pattern was less obvious than it was between a single caller and receiver. This may be because rumbles encode multiple messages simultaneously, so the computer model may not have been able to pick out the "name" used in each call, the authors wrote in the study.

"It just highlights the complexity of what's going on," O'Connell-Rodwell said. "And we're not skilled enough at what those measurements should be to figure out what's going on."

The researchers also found that elephants responded more strongly to recordings of calls originally addressed to them than to calls addressed to other elephants, further supporting their findings.

"The real value of this paper is that it shows how elephants are navigating through a large landscape and can still keep in touch with specific individuals," O'Connell-Rodwell said. "It allows them to spread out much further and still have very close tabs on individuals, not just the group. It's not just like, I'm sending out a ping. Somebody else is sending out a ping. It's much more sophisticated than that."

A deadly bacterium has been found in the bodies of six African savanna elephants that mysteriously died off in Zimbabwe in 2020. At the time, the carcasses of 35 African elephants (Loxodonta africana) were found scattered across the north of the country. 

The bacteria may explain the recent elephant die-off, as well as one in neighboring Botswana, researchers reported Oct. 25 in the journal Nature Communications. 

Related: Why 200,000 antelope dropped dead in 3 weeks

From August to November 2020, 35 elephants in Zimbabwe died of mysterious causes. Just before this, 350 African elephant carcasses were found scattered in  Botswana. Because most of the carcasses were near watering holes, scientists initially believed that the elephants ingested toxins produced by microscopic algae called cyanobacteria, which were present in the drinking water. Another leading theory was a disastrous outbreak of a type of bacteria called Pasteurella multocida, which can infect people after they are bitten and scratched by wild or domesticated animals, such as cats and dogs. P. multocida is naturally present in the throats of healthy wild animals, but stressful environmental conditions, such as high temperature and humidity, may fuel bacterial overgrowth that turns it into a deadly pathogen. 

In 2015, P. multocida killed roughly 200,000 saiga antelopes (Saiga tatarica tatarica) in central Kazakhstan, wiping out 62% of their global population in just three weeks. 

In the new study, scientists from the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust, the Animal and Plant Health Agency UK, the University of Surrey and laboratories in South Africa conducted necropsies on 15 elephants in the Zimbabwe die-off. They found high concentrations of the bacterium Bisgaard taxon 45, which is closely related to P. multocida, in the brain, liver and spleen of six of them. This bacterium is naturally found in the throats of parrot species.

Across multiple organs, the elephants also harbored lesions and hemorrhages indicative of a deadly form of bacterial blood poisoning known as hemorrhagic septicemia.

This is the first time septicemia by a Pasteurella species has been reported in African elephants.

"Failure to identify Bisgaard taxon 45 in samples from all 15 elephants was likely due sample quality and delays in testing," the study authors noted.

The new findings raise the odds that Bisgaard taxon 45 caused the mass mortality event in Botswana, too. However, no one collected samples from elephants in Botswana to confirm the bacteria's role in those deaths.

That's because even getting to the samples was a challenge.

"Identifying and then reaching the carcasses in time to obtain useful samples is one problem we often face in this type of work," study lead author Dr. Chris Foggin, a wildlife veterinarian at the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust, said in a statement. 

The carcasses were so big that researchers needed special permits to transport samples, and that took time. 

Scientists initially approached 25 of the elephants in Zimbabwe, but by the time the scientists arrived, 10 of the elephants were too decomposed to yield useful samples, according to the study.

A combination of environmental factors and elephants' social structure may have contributed to the bacteria's spread.

"Transmission of the bacteria is possible, especially given the highly sociable nature of elephants and the link between this infection and the stress associated with extreme weather events such as drought, which may make outbreaks more likely," Dr. Falko Steinbach, head of the virology department at the Animal and Plant Health Agency UK, said in a statement.

While drought may have stressed the elephants in Zimbabwe, poaching may have been a key stressor in Botswana, the study authors wrote.

African elephants are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and their population is declining mainly due to ivory-related poaching. . 

According to the study, the declining African elephant population paired with uncertain climate conditions, puts the population under high pressure in the future.

"Further research is needed to learn more about the bacteria and its long-term implications for the African elephant population and other wildlife," Steinbach said. 

As conservationists look on, an elephant is dramatically hoisted feet-first into the air by a truck, its long trunk dangling down towards the ground.

The stunning shot is one of the winners of this year's Environmental Photography Award — the third annual photo contest hosted by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.  

Photographer Marcus Westberg, who observed the chaotic scene in Malawi's Liwonde National Park, was named winner of the Change Makers: Reason for Hope category. 

Human settlements are increasingly overlapping with elephant habitats, resulting in problems for both elephants and people. In Liwonde National Park, elephant numbers have risen to almost 600 in the last eight years as a result of better law enforcement and security. The local population, which was increasing at a rate of 10% each year, had been spotted raiding crops in nearby villages. Translocation — in which the animals are moved to a different area away from people — is one solution to mitigate conflict in surrounding villages.  

In 2022, after three years of planning, the nonprofit conservation organization African Parks and wildlife translocation specialists Conservation Solutions relocated 263 elephants 220 miles (350 kilometers) from Liwonde in the south of the country to Kasungu National Park in the northwest.

Conservationists identified a suitable herd, darted the animals with tranquilizers from helicopters, and then placed them in trucks using cranes. Meanwhile, a team of specialists worked quickly on the ground, monitoring the elephants' health to ensure their safety. 

Related: Wild African elephants may have domesticated themselves

Although translocation of wild elephants has become common, there are still many difficulties that need to be managed throughout the process, such as the risk of elephants falling or hurting themselves or their calves. Some elephants may have underlying health problems that are not immediately obvious, such as heart conditions, and these can be exacerbated by the general anesthetic that is administered for the translocation. The process can also pose a risk to humans — three men were killed by the elephants after they were relocated because of an unfinished fence, the Guardian reports. 

In Malawi, protected areas are fragmented, meaning the rising elephant population can no longer migrate naturally. By moving some of the animals from areas with large populations to areas where there are fewer elephants, experts can safeguard populations and protect the needs of communities.

"Translocations have come to symbolize the mixed feelings I have about our relationship with the natural world," Westberg said in a statement emailed to Live Science. 

"On the one hand, they are an essential tool for strengthening endangered wildlife populations, bringing them back to areas from where they have disappeared. So, they are worth celebrating. On the other hand, they are only necessary because we have relentlessly destroyed habitats, blocked migration corridors and hunted wild animals to the brink of extinction."

Elephants rarely get cancer, and their giant, hot testicles might provide a clue as to why.

The idea comes down to a protein called p53, which helps prevent DNA damage in cells — including damage that could turn a normal cell into a cancerous cell. 

Elephants, unlike humans, have multiple copies of the gene that encodes p53 — meaning, the gene that provides the “recipe” for the body to make the protein. Fritz Vollrath, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, said this could help to protect their sperm from hot temperatures.

This hypothesis starts with "Peto's paradox," Vollrath told Live Science.

In the 1970s, an epidemiologist named Richard Peto described a puzzling phenomenon: Large animals, despite having many more cells that could potentially turn into cancerous cells, don't seem to have a higher risk of developing cancer than smaller animals. This is particularly astounding in elephants — they are statistically less likely to develop cancer than humans, despite being many times our size.

Related: Do elephants really 'never forget'?

A few years ago, researchers found that elephants have 20 copies of the gene that encodes the p53 protein. Humans, in comparison, have just one. The protein essentially works like a copy editor, reviewing genetic material as cells multiply and potentially killing off cells with any damages that could lead to cancer. As elephants have multiple copies of the gene that encodes p53, they could have multiple rounds of "copy-editing," which could vastly reduce the risk of a damaged cell surviving.

But why did elephants evolve 20 copies of this gene? Vollrath thinks it has to do with their testicles. Many male animals, including humans, have their testicles partially outside their body to cool them down, which is believed to be important for creating a healthy batch of sperm. The reasons for this are unclear, though it may have something to do with increased DNA damage at higher temperatures.

Through a quirk of evolutionary history, however, elephant testicles are located inside their bodies. As multi-ton, dark gray animals walking around in the sun, their testicles have the potential to get really hot — and therefore the elephants may have trouble making viable sperm. But if they had more copy-editing proteins, the theory goes, that hot sperm could be protected from damage.. 

Vollrath published this hypothesis as a note in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution on June 27.

It is hard to assess why exactly a particular trait might have evolved in a species, Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo, who was not involved in developing this new hypothesis, told Live Science.

It's possible that multiple copies of the p53 gene evolved to protect elephant sperm from hot temperatures. But it's also possible that those multiple copies evolved because elephants are big animals so are potentially more susceptible to cancer, Lynch said. It could also be both things at once.

Other large animals don't have multiple copies of the p53 gene. Whales, for example, are large animals with internal testicles, but they seem to have just one copy. But whales also have an internal system to cool their testicles down, Vollrath noted – plus, it doesn’t get as hot in the water.

Similarly, animals closely related to elephants, such as hyraxes, also have internal testicles. But these animals are much smaller than elephants, and small animals are way more efficient at dissipating heat than large animals, Lynch said.

No matter how it evolved, elephants seem to have a way of naturally circumventing cancer — and studying how it works may help us understand more about the disease, Vollrath said.

Enigmatic "ivory rings" found in dozens of Anglo-Saxon burials in England have long baffled archaeologists, who weren't sure of the rings' origin and which animal they came from — elephants, walruses or mammoths. But now, scientific techniques have revealed that these rings likely came from African elephants living about 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) away, a new study finds. 

The finding indicates a trading network brought the objects from eastern Africa and across post-Roman Europe to England — perhaps one of the longest trade route distances known from that time.

"It's really a long way," study co-author Hugh Willmott, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. told Live Science. "It's crossing the Mediterranean world, and then the Alps, and then probably going via the Rhineland… so it's crossing multiple cultures."

The researchers analyzed one of seven so-called "bag rings" found in graves at an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery, dated to between the late fifth and early sixth centuries A.D., near the village of Scremby, about 65 miles (110 km) east of Sheffield. 

After analyzing the ivory's collagen protein, the team found that the ring was made from the tusk of an African elephant (genus Loxodonta) and radiocarbon analysis revealed the pachyderm lived around the fifth century A.D. The researchers published their findings in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Related: Photos: Snapshots of mysterious Sutton Hoo burial excavation revealed

Mysterious rings

"Bag rings" have puzzled archaeologists for more than 200 years. Hundreds have been found at Anglo-Saxon burial sites in England, while a few have been found in other parts of northwestern Europe.

The rings measure between 4 and 6 inches (10 and 15 centimeters) across and they've been found only in the graves of wealthy Anglo-Saxon women. Much too large to fit a finger, they were once thought to be ornaments for the upper arm. But archaeologists now think the rings were tied around the waist and held bags that functioned as pockets, holding whatever small objects the women had to hand.

"We often find [the bags] contained objects, and they tend to be quite random," Willmott said. "Broken copper, Roman coins, things like that."

Their discovery only in wealthy graves may indicate status: "They may have been associated with women who had a special place in society," he said.

Ivory origins

The researchers also measured the ivory's ratio of strontium isotopes (forms of the element with different neutron counts). These ratios indicate the geology of a region. The results showed that the elephant grew up in an area with geologically young volcanic rocks — probably the Rift Valley region of East Africa, Willmott said.

The lack of finds of ivory workings in Anglo-Saxon England suggests the rings were crafted in Africa — probably in Aksum, a center for ivory working at that time — and then traded until they reached England, he said. It's possible that the few bag rings found in continental Europe may be evidence of that trade. 

Finds show the ivory rings were popular among Anglo-Saxons for at least 100 years. "So we're talking about a sustained trade," Willmott said. But their use seems to have ended in the seventh century, possibly because the established trade route had been disturbed.

Apart from this new evidence for importing African ivory, the Anglo-Saxons are known to have imported glassware from France, amber beads from the Baltic, amethyst beads from the eastern Mediterranean and cowrie shells from the Red Sea or India. But there are no records of the trading networks that supplied these items. 

Ken Dark, an archaeologist and historian at King's College London, wasn't involved in the latest study but researches long-distance trade in Europe in the first millennium.

"This study may add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that trading networks of the fifth- to seventh- centuries were far more extensive and complex than often previously supposed," he told Live Science. 

Rowan English, an archaeologist at the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions at Aarhus University in Denmark who also wasn't involved, said experts had long suspected that the bag rings were made from imported elephant ivory, and the new study was "final confirmation." 

But he cautioned that other bag rings may have come from elsewhere: "My own work has recorded over 700 of these rings in cemeteries in early medieval England... more contextual and scientific work needs to be done."

Archaeologists in eastern India have unearthed a statue of an elephant they think was carved about 2,300 years ago, when Buddhism was the main religion in the region. 

The statue is about 3 feet (1 meter) high and carved from rock in the same style as other Buddhist statues of elephants found across the state of Odisha.

Historian Anil Dhir and other members of an archaeological team from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) unearthed the statue in April at a village on the banks of the Daya River in Odisha's Puri District. "We were surveying the Daya River Valley to document its heritage," Dhir told Live Science in an email. "This area is rich in artifacts from the ancient Buddhism which flourished here."

The team found several other buried archaeological relics around the village, including architectural pieces from a Buddhist temple, he added. 

Related: 1st-century Buddha statue from ancient Egypt indicates Buddhists lived there in Roman times

The elephant statue is very similar to one found at Dhauli, also known as Dhaulagiri, an ancient center of Buddhism about 12 miles (19 kilometers) upstream, Dhir said. That statue has been dated to between 272 B.C. and 231 B.C. 

Buddha and Hinduism

Buddhism originated in northern India in the sixth or fifth century B.C. and was one of the main religions under Emperor Ashoka of the Maurya Empire in the second century B.C., the historian Upinder Singh of Ashoka University in India wrote in "History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century" (Pearson India, 2009). The empire covered most of India, including what's now Pakistan, but not the very south of the subcontinent.

And from the third century B.C. until about the second century A.D., Buddhism "held sway" throughout much of India and the Odisha region in particular, Dhir said.

But Buddhism's influence declined as its practices became assimilated into the myriad traditions of Hinduism and when Islam became more influential in the region after the 10th century; and while Buddhism is now widespread in other parts of Asia, it is only followed by about 0.7% of the modern population of India, according to a 2011 census. (The Buddha is worshipped, however, in some Hindu ceremonies, sometimes as an avatar of the god Vishnu.)

According to a statement by INTACH, the floodplains of the Daya and Mandakini rivers are rich in Buddhist antiquities.

Records also suggest that a fort was built at the site in the 16th century, and the INTACH team has found remnants of its defensive walls and moat.

Elephant symbolism

Dhir said the elephant was a common motif in Buddhism and could be seen in many Buddhist monuments.

The INTACH statement said the recently unearthed elephant statue was found near a pillar of laterite — a reddish clay material — and other stone blocks: Similar finds were also discovered alongside another elephant statue found in the village of Kaima in Odisha's Jajpur District. 

Art historian Christian Luczanits of SOAS at the University of London told Live Science that elephants were important royal animals in ancient India and symbolized the monsoon rains and fertility. 

Peter Harvey, a historian of Buddhism and a "faith advisor" at York St John University in the U.K., added that the elephant was also the mythical animal ridden by the pre-Buddhist god Indra, who was identified in early Indian Buddhism as a disciple of the Buddha and named Sakka (also spelled Śakra).

The elephant's direct connection to Buddhism came about from a story that the mother of Siddhartha Gautama — the Indian prince who would become the Buddha — dreamt after he was conceived that "an auspicious white elephant [had] entered her womb," Harvey said. 

An ancient "elephant graveyard" chock-full of massive bones has been unearthed along what was once a prehistoric river in northern Florida. 

The fossils of these long-extinct beasts belong to gomphotheres — a relative of modern elephants — and date to about 5.5 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch. 

"It was very exciting because this gave us an opportunity to not only see what an adult [gomphothere] would have looked like, but also to very carefully document each and every bone in its skeleton," said Jonathan Bloch, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History who co-led the excavation. "That's exciting from a scientific perspective if you're trying to understand the anatomy of these animals and something about their biology and evolution," Bloch told Live Science.

Researchers discovered the trove of gomphothere bones at the site, a large-scale excavation area near Gainesville known as the Montbrook Site, in 2022. Although excavators had unearthed some gomphothere bones there before, the team was surprised when a volunteer found the remains of an especially large individual. 

"I started coming upon one after another of toe and ankle bones," Dean Warner, a retired chemistry teacher and Montbrook volunteer, said in a statement. "As I continued to dig, what turned out to be the ulna and radius [long arm bones] started to be uncovered."

Related: The most surprising elephant relatives on Earth

Eventually, the team excavated entire skeletons from one adult and at least seven juvenile gomphotheres. The adult measures 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall to the shoulders, the scientists estimated, while its skull and tusks are more than 9 feet (2.7 m) long, which is roughly the same size as a modern African elephant (Loxodonta africana) — a remarkable size that sets a local record for largest gomphothere. 

"Not only were the bones much larger than any of the other individuals that we've seen, but they were actually in place as if the animal had just laid down and died," Bloch said. 

The animals likely died hundreds of years apart rather than all at once. The researchers believe the adult drowned at this location, while the other animals were likely swept up by the water after dying and accumulated at a bend in the river. Bloch called the pile-up a "bonejam," similar to when too many loose logs clog up a river to create a logjam. 

Species in the gomphotheres' family are typically differentiated by their tusk shape and body size. The tusks of the ancient Montbrook beasts have a unique enamel banding, which means these species are part of the genus Rhynchotherium, the researchers said. Millions of years ago, these elephant relatives once thrived in open savannas throughout Africa, Eurasia and the Americas. However, grasslands gradually started to replace savannas in these areas due to cooling temperatures beginning around 14 million years ago — and competition over limited resources following the arrival of mammoths and elephants eventually drove gomphotheres to extinction about 1.6 million years ago, a 2020 study in the journal Paleobiology found. 

The new discovery will help researchers better understand the lives of these ancient proboscideans and the environments they lived in, according to the researchers. Eventually, the public will be able to see the largest specimen on display; Bloch and his team are planning to assemble the fossils from the adult gomphothere and place it alongside the massive mammoth and mastodon skeletons currently at the Florida Museum of Natural History. 

"There's so much we can learn from these things and we're excited to do it in future," Bloch said. 

Wild elephants may have domesticated themselves, a process that has only been previously identified in bonobos and humans, a new study suggests. 

For thousands of years, people have domesticated, or bred other animals such as dogs and horses to enhance their friendliness, reduce aggression and increase cooperation. Some scientists think a similar phenomenon called self-domestication has given humans and bonobos (Pan paniscus) traits commonly found in domestic animals. During self-domestication, individuals who are less aggressive and more cooperative are more likely to successfully breed and pass on their genes. However, experts told Live Science that the underlying idea of "self-domestication" doesn't really hold water.

In the new study, Limor Raviv, who studies the evolution of languages at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and her colleagues suggest that elephants have also domesticated themselves. The findings were published Apr. 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Related: Watch an elephant peel a banana with her trunk in incredible, first-of-its-kind footage

The scientists compared wild African elephants from the species Loxodonta africana with bonobos and humans on 19 social, cognitive and physical traits. The researchers found that elephants, like bonobos and humans, are not very aggressive, play a lot, have a long childhood — reaching adolescence at 10 to 20 years old — and babysit each other's offspring. They also found that elephants, like bonobos and humans, have relatively short jawbones, a trait commonly seen in other domesticated animals and which is thought to be a byproduct of selecting for other traits during domestication.

By comparing the genome of wild African savannah elephants with those of 261 domesticated mammals such as dogs, cats and horses, the scientists identified 79 genes linked to domestication in other species that seem to have become more common in elephant generations over time.

The findings suggest that elephants have been self-domesticated, the scientists wrote in their paper. One factor driving this self-domestication could be the "massive size and relative strength" of elephants, because they are "less worried about evading or fighting other animals for their survival," the researchers wrote in their paper. This could allow the gentle giants to "free cognitive resources and open up opportunities for exploration, communication, and play," the team wrote.

But other experts aren't sold on the concept.

"It's a fun idea but I'm certainly not convinced by self-domestication as a concept," Dominic Wright, an evolutionary biologist who studies domestication at Linköping University in Sweden, told Live Science. "I certainly agree that humans have evolved to have increased sociality and increased communication but I don't think you need to bring in this term of self-domestication for humans or elephants."  The term is unnecessary as it doesn’t help us understand how animal domestication or evolution of social behavior occurs, Wright said.

What's more, the genetic evidence in the study is weak, said Wright, who was not involved in the research.

"They link genes in elephants with genetic pathways thought to be involved in the domestication of other animals but that doesn't really tell us if those genes actually contribute to them having traits associated with domestication, they may have any other function."

"I would personally not use the concept of self-domestication, but that's more like a semantic issue," Per Jensen, a geneticist studying animal domestication at Linköping University in Sweden, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. 

Still, the study presents an "interesting idea" that helps "trigger new thoughts on how increased cooperativeness and reduced aggression has evolved," which could ultimately help us find ways to reduce aggression in humans, Jensen said.

They say "an elephant never forgets." But how much truth is there to that expression? How good is an elephant's memory?

Though it's not strictly accurate to say an elephant never forgets, the pachyderms did evolve to remember details that are key to their survival. For example, elder African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can recall the unique sounds and smells of predators (even discriminating between different groups of people, depending on their odor and clothing color), retrace their steps to find water holes in the arid savanna, and distinguish family members and associates from hundreds of other elephants.

"Being able to seek out sufficient food and water in a highly dynamic environment such as the savanna, while also managing complex social relationships and avoiding predation risk, requires a brain capable of processing and remembering detailed information," Graeme Shannon, a lecturer in zoology at Bangor University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "This is a critical skill that can mean the difference between life and death."

Elephants are not the only animals that forage for food in the savanna, but the unique challenges these pachyderms face demand exquisite memories. For instance, each elephant needs to eat about 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of vegetation each day, and to satisfy their voracious appetites, elephants embark on long migration routes between the wet and dry seasons. Whether they survive that migration depends heavily on their knowledge of the route.

"An elephant's memory facilitates remembering long migration routes that include tree and water resources, which are important in order to make it through a very long migration," Caitlin O'Connell, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School who studies elephant hearing, told Live Science in an email. 

Related: Do elephant tusks or rhino horns ever grow back?

Memory becomes particularly important during a drought. A 2008 study in the journal Biology Letters observed that elephant herds with older matriarchs, who had lived through prior droughts, successfully led their herds to water — presumably by remembering how the herd had survived the prior drought.

One herd, however, was led by a young matriarch that could not have remembered how the previous generation had handled the last drought. Her herd stayed put rather than traveling through new terrain to find water, and its calves suffered a 63% mortality rate that year. The normal fatality rate during a drought is only 2%. "Hence the importance of older matriarchs as important repositories of knowledge," said O'Connell, who was not involved in the study. "And hence why long-term memory can lead directly to survival."

Elephants also need their memories to navigate what biologists call a "fission-fusion" dynamic. In this arrangement, also common among primates and some whale species, a core family unit of elephants comes into contact with hundreds of other elephants over the course of the year (fusion), only to later break off into the same core group (fission). 

"Operating in a highly complex social world takes considerable brain power," Shannon said. "It is crucial that elephants have detailed knowledge on familiar families and close associates, as well as being able to identify strangers and being more cautious when interacting with these unknown individuals," who might act aggressively and pose a threat to the family unit.

Unknown elephants are not the only threats these pachyderms need to keep in mind to survive. Shannon was a co-author of a 2011 study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences that demonstrated that younger elephants underreact to recorded sounds of roaring male lions, whereas older elephants (who would remember prior lion attacks) assume defensive positions in response to the roars. 

In another study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, Shannon and colleagues demonstrated that elephants can also identify the voices of humans who pose a threat. They found that elephants are more likely to take precautions when they hear the recorded voices of semi-nomadic Maasai people, who periodically kill elephants, than the voices of other Kenyan ethnicities. The elephants were also more likely to defend themselves when they heard the recorded voices of Maasai men, as opposed to recordings of Maasai women and children. "The incredible memories and cognitive abilities of elephants has even enabled them to use human language to determine the threat posed by different groups of humans," he said.

Elephants' unique brain structures may be what allows them to pull off these impressive feats of memory and cognition. A series of studies conducted by Bob Jacobs, a professor of psychology who specializes in neuroscience at Colorado College, has demonstrated that elephants' cortical neurons are radically different from those of other intelligent species. Jacobs thinks that the unique characteristics of these neurons suggest that elephants carefully mull over their memories. "In terms of cognition," he wrote in The Conversation, "my colleagues and I believe that the integrative cortical circuitry in the elephant supports the idea that they are essentially contemplative animals."

Related: Why can't we remember our dreams?

Elephants also have the largest absolute brain size among land mammals, and the largest temporal lobe relative to body size; the temporal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for processing sounds and encoding memory.

The fact that elephants rely so heavily on their memory makes conservation efforts all the more necessary. When poachers target the largest elephants with the biggest tusks, they are usually placing the oldest elephants in their sights — repositories of the herd's collective memory — and those losses mean that younger elephants are left in charge of a herd that they do not have the experience to lead to safety during the dry season. 

Likewise, if elephant survival hinges on elders remembering migration routes, development that changes the landscape and cuts off crucial paths could have devastating consequences for entire herds. "Their habitat is threatened by human development blocking important migration routes, leaving them confined to marginal lands that often don't have important resources needed to survive long dry seasons," O'Connell said. "An obvious implication is the importance of preserving critical migration routes."

Deep in a Tanzanian rainforest in 1972, a famous aging chimpanzee matriarch called Flo breathed her last breath. For her son, Flint, it seemed to be an unbearable loss. The chimp, who was unusually bonded to his mother, suddenly grew listless, losing his appetite and becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the troop. 

"He ate seldom, and by the end of the third week had lost more than a third of his weight," wrote a young Jane Goodall: The famous primatologist had been a long-time observer of the troop. Then, one month after his mother died, Goodall reported that the emaciated Flint had died, too. 

Researchers have recorded dozens of accounts of strange and heart-rending behaviors like this across the animal kingdom, when an animal's relatives or companions die. These behaviors bring up a compelling question: Do animals grieve and mourn their dead as humans do?

Death rituals

Not too long ago, this might have been dismissed as an unscientific question. But more and more researchers are exploring this idea, and their work falls into a broad field of study called "evolutionary thanatology" — the study of death and its associated rituals. 

Increasingly, this field includes research on behaviors that extend beyond the human realm — such as the case of a female chimp (Pan troglodytes) in Zambia that was observed carefully using a piece of grass to clean the teeth of her recently deceased adopted son, in an almost funereal ritual, according to a 2017 study in the journal Scientific Reports. Or, the account of a Kenyan giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi) that stood vigil over the body of her dead calf even after it had been ravaged by hyenas. 

Related: Which animals sing? 

Similarly, in 2018 many were transfixed by the story of a female orca (Orcinus orca) in the Salish Sea off the coast of Canada and Washington that spent 17 days tirelessly pushing along her lifeless calf, traversing 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) with the body before finally letting it go.

It's not just wild animals that display this kind of behavior, but domesticated ones too: Stefania Uccheddu, a veterinarian and researcher at the San Marco Veterinary Clinic and Laboratory in Italy, remembered a case a few years ago when a dog came into her practice for treatment because he refused to eat. "My colleagues took blood samples, they checked the heart — everything was okay. There was no reason to explain why the dog did not eat any more," Uccheddu told Live Science. "The only difference is that his brother had died one week ago." 

This event kick-started Uccheddu's investigation into death-related behaviors in dogs, which resulted in the first study to document a spate of grief-like behaviors in these animals when their canine companions died — including sleeping more, as well as eating and playing less. 

Back in the wild, elephants show some of the most widely documented and striking behaviors around death. African elephants (Loxodonta africana) have been known to tote around the jawbones of their deceased relatives, and to gather in silence for long periods over corpses, almost completely still with their heads dipped downward, and their heavy trunks resting on the ground.

Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) show behaviors that seem similarly mournful. In 2013, elephant biologist Sanjeeta Pokharel found a dead Asian elephant on a riverbank in India, in a spot that was devoid of vegetation. Despite this, the body was mysteriously surrounded by "lots of branches, trees, leaves and everything. That indicates that they might have been brought there," Pokharel told Live Science, who is based at Kyoto University, Japan, and who later described the event in a 2019 study in the journal Primates. She also recounted that two females trekked to the site and walked around the body almost ceremoniously. The somewhat ritualistic scenario reminded her of "a funeral ceremony that happens in Hindu culture where [people] go around the carcass," Pokharel said. "It was exactly like that."

In 2022, she and her co-researcher and husband Nachiketh Sharma, an elephant biologist also based at Kyoto University, published a study in the journal Royal Society Open Science chronicling several death-related behaviors in Asian elephants, crowdsourced from YouTube videos — which including one rarely observed behavior of females doggedly carrying around their dead newborns, draped over their trunks and tusks, for days at a time. 

Related: What's the chattiest animal? 

"Many times, we also got emotional [watching this]," Pohkarel said. In this scenario, "as a human, you can clearly see some kind of grief. [But] I don't know whether we can call it grief right now." 

She described the difficulty at the heart of such research: Researchers lack definitive scientific proof of what these animals are going through, and so there is a risk of anthropomorphizing animals if scientists label it "grief." But by the same token, if researchers don't recognize things that can't be measured, do they risk overlooking a potential wealth of animal emotion? 

What, then, should we call it when a captive dolphin who's lost its companion sinks to the bottom of the pool, sitting there for long stretches and coming to the surface only to breathe? Or the wailing sound a sea lion makes when it loses its young?

Deciphering "grief"

Trying to define these behaviors opens up a can of worms. One school of thought is that in order to grieve, an individual must first be able to understand the concept of death and their relationship with this inevitable force — something that's difficult to prove in animals. (Although, there are some compelling cases that animals do conceptualize death.)

However, a grasp of death may not be necessary for an individual to feel grief. Another way of seeing grief is as part of the process of trying to understand a loss — and therefore observable in how an individual responds to a lifeless corpse. 

It's also true that these behaviors could be ascribed to many other things: curiosity, confusion, stress or fear. This is especially the case in species where the death-response is a little more bizarre. 

Take crows as an example. Death-related behaviors are most frequently recorded in social mammals that form strong bonds with one another, but these birds are a notable exception with their famous "crow funerals." During these events, crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) gather around the bodies of dead crows in rowdy displays — cawing while examining corpses, and sometimes also attacking and even trying to mate with them. Some researchers suggest that a relative's death may provide an opportunity for these birds to familiarize themselves with the concepts of risk and threat, and to learn about their vulnerabilities from this experience.

Meanwhile, elephants have been observed burying their dead in mud, or covering them with branches and leaves, Sharma said — which, rather than a symbol of mourning, could be a practical attempt to stop a corpse from attracting predators. Similarly, elephants that gather round a corpse seem to be in mourning, but they also sniff and touch the body — so what if instead of pondering their loss, they're simply investigating the cause of death? 

"We can't say whether the elephants are actually curious, or grieving," Sharma said. "It's very difficult to decipher."

Related: Do elephant tusks or rhino horns ever grow back?

How to think about animal grief

Even in humans there's no rulebook for what grief looks like; it manifests in a large and wide-ranging spectrum of behaviors and emotions. So who's to say that curiosity, fear and learning aren't steps in that process for animals, too? 

These jumbled and conflicting views are perhaps what prompted anthropologist Barbara J. King to draw up her own definition of animal grief. The prominent scientist, who wrote a book titled "How Animals Grieve" (University of Chicago Press, 2013), explained that we can define grief by a change in essential functions — a departure from the usual pattern of eating, sleeping and socializing — that is triggered by death. This would widen the net of grief to include dozens of animal species that experience this emotion, King argued.

Some researchers support the idea that grief is valuable for survival, which could also strengthen the case that it occurs in animals. For example, baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) that become listless after a relative's death receive increased rates of grooming by other members of the troop, observational research shows.

"Probably this kind of reduction of activity is a way to save energy, attract the attention of your companions, and at the same time create a new network" to replace the one the animal's lost, Uccheddu said. It's not dissimilar to our human world, where communities come together to feed and care for grieving people after a death, she pointed out. 

Meanwhile, more data may eventually bring us closer to understanding what an animal experiences when another one dies. For example, facial recognition technologies are helping researchers track dogs' reactions to life events, Uccheddu explained. Measuring potential shifts in key hormones like oxytocin (thought to play a role in social bonding) could also give us a more precise read on an animal's internal state after it experiences a companion's death, Pokharel added. 

Nevertheless, the question of animal grief is up against a gaping dearth of research on animal cognition and emotion, with complex questions to answer if scientists are ever to definitively prove that animals feel grief. Unless researchers find a way to talk to other species, there's unlikely to be any way to objectively know what they feel. As Sharma said, "only an elephant can say that it's grieving."

Perhaps, though, the ultimate question should be less about whether animal grief exists, and more about how powerful it could be if we acted as though it did. 

Assuming that animals feel attachment to their companions and experience grief-like emotions when they die could have huge welfare implications. It could make us more sensitive to our pets, and help us take better care of animals in zoos. It could also encourage people to care more about humanity's impact on the planet — whether that's poaching, habitat destruction, pollution or climate change — and make a better case for protecting it, for the species we share it with. 

"When we talk about conservation, at least some kind of emotion should be there," Pokharel said. What better way to accomplish that, than to believe that our fellow animals feel it, too? 

Originally published on Live Science.

Asian elephants, like their African cousins, seem to mourn their dead, sometimes even carrying their lost infants in their trunks for days or weeks, new research finds. 

Whether elephants understand death in the same way humans do is unknown — and probably unknowable. But Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are social creatures, and the new research adds to the evidence that they experience some sort of emotional response when they lose one of their own.

"Understanding elephants' response to death might have some far reaching effects on their conservation," study co-authors Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and Nachiketha Sharma of the  Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study, wrote to Live Science in an email. "We have personally observed that when people witness an elephant responding to a dead kin, there will be some sense of relatedness, compassion and empathy towards the species. Therefore, anything which instantly connects people might pave the way for coexistence in elephant ranging countries." 

Death ritual

African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana) have long been observed reacting emotionally when a herd member dies. They might approach the body and touch it with their trunks, kick at the corpse or stand nearby as if on guard. Asian elephants, however, are less well-understood. They tend to live in forested habitat, so they are harder to observe in the wild than savanna-dwelling African elephants.

Related: The longest living animals on Earth

"They can be 100 feet [30 meters] away from you, and you might not see them because the forest is so dense," said Brian Aucone, the senior vice president for life sciences at the Denver Zoo, who was not involved in the new study. .

To get around this, Pokharel, Sharma, and their co-author Raman Sukumar, all of the Indian Institute of Science at the time, turned to YouTube, where remarkable animal videos are a staple. They searched the site for keywords related to Asian elephants and death, and uncovered 39 videos of 24 cases between 2010 and 2021 in which one or more Asian elephants were seen reacting to the loss of a herdmate. Eighty percent of the videos showed wild elephants, 16% captive elephants and 4% semi-captive elephants (typically, semi-captive elephants are animals that work in the timber industry or in tourist parks in Asia).

Some of the most striking behaviors seen in the videos occurred when a calf died. In five of the 12 videos showing a deceased calf, a female adult — likely the mother — was seen carrying the calf. Based on the state of decomposition of the corpse, it appeared that this carrying behavior went on for days or weeks.

Indian Forest Service ranger Parveen Kaswan uploaded one such video in 2019, showing an Asian elephant dragging the body of a calf across a road in what he likened to a "funeral procession" in a post on Twitter at the time.

"I think they're holding on and trying to grasp what has happened, and there's something happening there with their interaction with their offspring, just like it would be with us," Aucone said of the behavior.

Other common elephant reactions seen in the videos included restlessness or alertness when near the corpse; exploratory movements such as approaching or investigating the body; or touching and smelling. Elephants communicate through scent, Aucone said, so the sniffing is not surprising. In 10 cases, the elephants tried to lift, nudge or shake the body, as if to attempt to revive their lost comrade. In 22 cases, they seemed to stand vigil over the body.

"We've seen some of this before ourselves," Aucone told Live Science. When the zoo euthanizes older elephants due to illness or infirmity, the staff give herdmates a chance to say goodbye, Aucone said. The survivors often sniff the deceased elephant or lay their trunks by its mouth, a social behavior.

Animal grief

Elephants aren't the only social creatures that react to death, especially to the death of babies. Orca mothers have been observed pushing their dead calves around, as have dolphins. In 2018, an orca female named Tahlequah off the coast of Washington held on to her lost baby for 17 days. Other female orcas were seen huddled around Tahlequah and her dead newborn in the hours after the baby's death in what looked like a circle of grief. Ape and monkey mothers sometimes carry around dead infants for weeks or months.

In the case of the elephants, which are devoted to caring for their young, the mother-calf bond is fundamental, Pokharel, Sharma and Sukumar wrote in the study, published Wednesday (May 18) in the journal Royal Society Open Science. This is true of primates, as well, Pokharel and Sharma told Live Science.

"[T]he mother-calf/infant bonding in both elephants and primates have some striking similarities as both nurture their young until they become strong enough to forage and defend themselves," they wrote. "Therefore, this long lasting bond between mothers and calves/infants may potentially motivate mothers to respond towards their unresponsive calves. It is very difficult to predict the exact causations and functionality behind the dead infants carrying. But, some of the YouTube videos certainly provide evidence that some species may have some sense of death awareness."

Originally published on Live Science.

Spanish police have seized more than 1,000 taxidermy animals that were part of a private collection worth around $32 million in what they have described as "one of the largest ever" illegal wildlife busts in Europe. Almost half of the specimens recovered are either listed as endangered or have already been declared extinct.

Officers from Spain's Civil Guard seized the collection o from a massive warehouse in the town of Bétera near Valencia in Eastern Spain, according to a statement released on April 10. 

In total, officials recovered 1,090 taxidermy specimens, including entire elephants, white rhinos, cheetahs, leopards, lions, crocodiles, tigers and a polar bear, as well as 198 elephant tusks. The team also found other items, including stools that appeared to be made from elephants' feet and chairs upholstered with crocodile skin, according to a video by ABC News. 

Related: Man caught at Mexican border allegedly had more than 50 reptiles stuffed into his clothing

The officials said 405 of the specimens belong to species that are illegal to trade internationally under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The collection also included a scimitar oryx, which was declared extinct in 2000, and an addax, a type of antelope that is functionally extinct in the wild, which means there as so few left that it is almost a certainty they will eventually disappear.  

The collection is estimated to be worth around $31.6 million (29 million euros) on the black market, according to the statement. 

The interior of the warehouse, which is around 538,000 square feet (50,000 square meters), looks like a natural history museum in images; some of the walls are painted with vistas from some of the animals' natural habitats, and some specimens were housed in glass display cases. The warehouse also contained basic living quarters and two boats, according to the statement.

The owner of the property has been the target of a major international investigation since November 2021 but has not been arrested. However, he continues to be investigated for wildlife smuggling, according to the statement. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The world is full of beautiful equations, numbers and calculations. From counting beads as toddlers to managing finances as adults, we use math every day. But scientists often go beyond these quotidian forms of counting, to measure, weigh and tally far stranger things in the universe. From the number of bubbles in a typical glass of beer to the weight of all the coronavirus particles circulating in the world, here are 10 weird things scientists calculated in 2021.

Related: Photos: Large numbers that define the universe

Beer bubbles

Pouring ice-cold beer into a glass forms lots of tiny bubbles — and thanks to some thirsty scientists, now we know how many. 

These scientists calculated that a half-pint glass of beer produces up to 2 million bubbles, about twice as many bubbles as Champagne makes. But the researchers found that the number of bubbles in a half-pint glass ranged from 200,000 to 2 million, according to their study, published in March in the journal ACS Omega. It turns out that the number of bubbles depends on three factors: the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) in the glass, the volume of bubbles and the point at which the CO2 depletes such that no more bubbles form. Also, tiny flaws in the glass would help bubbles emerge from the liquid.

Read more: How many bubbles are in a glass of beer?

Weight of SARS-CoV-2

If you were to gather all the particles of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, circulating around the globe into one place, the weight of the tiny, invisible particles would be somewhere between that of an apple and a young toddler, according to a study published in June in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That calculation is based on the estimation that each infected individual carries about 10 billion to 100 billion SARS-CoV-2 particles at the peak of their infection. If there are between 1 million and 10 million infections at any given time, which has been the case during the course of the pandemic, the particles together would weigh somewhere between 0.22 and 22 pounds (0.1 and 10 kilograms).

"Here we are talking about a super-tiny mass of viruses, and they are completely wreaking havoc on the world," the researchers told Live Science. 

Read more: How much does all the SARS-CoV-2 in the world weigh? 

Elephants from space

Using satellites and artificial intelligence, researchers counted African elephants from space for the first time, according to a study published online in Dec. 2020 in the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. The team combined high-resolution images of Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa captured by satellites that orbit 372 miles (600 kilometers) above Earth's surface. This novel technique can survey thousands of miles in minutes, which is much faster than the typical way conservationists count elephants in low-flying planes, a process that can take hours. The researchers say this method could be vital for ensuring the survival of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana), a species the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies as endangered. 

Read more: Elephants counted from space using satellites and AI

Acceleration of a finger snap

Using high-speed cameras and force sensors, researchers figured out the fastest acceleration of the human body: a snap of the fingers. Finger snaps generate maximal rotational velocities of 7,800 degrees per second and a maximal rotational acceleration of 1.6 million degrees per second squared, according to a study published in November in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The acceleration of a finger snap is three times the acceleration produced by a professional baseball player's arm. 

"When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair," study senior author Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in a statement. "The finger snap occurs in only seven milliseconds — more than 20 times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds." 

Read more: Scientists find the fastest acceleration in the human body

Most precise pi ever

Pi is one of the most famous irrational numbers, which means it can't be expressed as a common fraction and has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point. Researchers in Switzerland have now calculated the most precise value of pi ever, up to 62.8 trillion decimal places. Of course, the calculations, which took 108 days, weren't done by hand but rather with a supercomputer. But don't get too comfortable with this achievement. Because pi is irrational, this record can be broken over and over … forever. 

Read more: Pi calculated to a record-breaking 62.8 trillion digits

Popularity of your friends

According to the "friendship paradox," an idea that was first formulated in 1991, your friends are typically more popular than you are. But a group of mathematicians came up with a new theory that they say better describes real-world friendships, according to a study published in May in the Journal of Complex Networks. "Averages are often highly misleading or at least can fail to describe people's experiences," lead author George Cantwell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, previously told Live Science. "Some people are less popular than their friends; others are more so." 

Their new equations show that the friendship paradox tends to be stronger in social networks made up of people with different levels of popularity, such as a high school. If a person has two friends in the same social network as a person with 100 friends, in general, the friendship paradox will be stronger than in a network where the most social person has 10 friends and the least social person has three. 

Read more: The 'friendship paradox' doesn't always explain real friendships, mathematicians say

Black holes

How many black holes exist in the universe? These mysterious objects are so dense that not even light escapes themt. Astronomers can't detect all the black holes out there, so they turned to theoretical calculations. In a study published in October the preprint database arXiv, a group of researchers calculated that there might be millions of small black holes in our cosmic neighborhood, or the most immediate environment around the sun, according to NASA. The largest black holes, supermassive black holes, are much rarer than the smaller ones; each galaxy usually has only one. All in all, they calculated that black holes hold about 1% of all ordinary matter (not dark matter) in the universe. 

Read more: How many black holes are there in the universe?

Walking around the moon

How long would it take to walk around the moon? The answer isn't black-and-white; rather, it depends on a number of factors, including how fast you walk and how much time you spend walking each day. It also depends on whether you take detours to avoid rough topography. At a hypothetical walking speed of up to 3.1 mph (5 km/h), which researchers previously calculated in a 2014 study, it would take about 91 days to walk the 6,786 miles (10,921 kilometers) around the moon, Live Science reported this year. But because it's not possible to walk nonstop for 91 days, the journey would likely take much longer. It's more likely that a person would walk a few hours a day. If a person walked at this speed for 4 hours a day, it would take about 547 Earth days, or about 1.5 years, to walk around the moon.

Read more: How long would it take to walk around the moon?

Satellites orbiting Earth

In another article, Live Science explored the question of how many satellites currently orbit the planet. Since Russia launched Sputnik, the world's first human-made satellite, in 1957, thousands of satellites have been lofted. About 10 to 60 were launched annually until the 2010s. Since then, the numbers have increased tremendously: 1,300 new satellites were sent to low Earth orbit in 2020 and more than 1,400 in 2021. As of September 2021, there were around 7,500 active satellites in low Earth orbit, Live Science reported.

Read more: How many satellites orbit Earth?

"Absolute limit" on the human life span

The "absolute limit" on the human life span may be 120 to 150 years, according to a study published in May in the journal Nature Communications. A group of researchers calculated that limit using a mathematical model, which predicted that after 120 to 150 years, the body would lose its resilience, or the ability to recover from illness and injury. But if future therapies targeted and extended the body's resilience, humans might be able to live longer, the researchers said. The data for the study came from large data sets that contained medical data for more than 500,000 people across the U.S., the U.K. and Russia. The data included blood tests in which the researchers specifically looked for the ratio of two types of disease-fighting white blood cells.

Read more: Human life span may have an 'absolute limit' of 150 years

Originally published on Live Science.

Humanity's fingerprint can be seen across the planet today, from the towering skyscrapers that define our modern metropolises to the pyramids and other ancient monuments of our past. Human activity also marks our sprawling open fields of agriculture and the roads that link everything together. But what would the world look like if humans had never existed?

Some scientists paint a picture of a pristine wilderness and an abundance of species, from the familiar to the not so familiar. "I think it would be a much more vegetated place with a wealth of animals, of large size spread across all continents except Antarctica," Trevor Worthy, a paleontologist and associate professor at Flinders University in Australia, told Live Science. 

A world without modern humans might also mean that our extinct human relatives, such as the Neanderthals, would still be around. And they, undoubtedly, also would have changed the landscape.

Related: What's the first species humans drove to extinction? 

Humans have shaped the world at the expense of many species, from the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) to the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus), which we drove to extinction through activities such as hunting and habitat destruction. 

The extinction rate on Earth today is more than 100 times what it would be without humans by the most conservative estimates and hasn't been higher since the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event that wiped out about 80% of animal species, including the nonavian dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, Live Science previously reported. In other words, humans hit this planet like an asteroid, and the dust is still settling as wildlife continues to decline.

"My great, great grandfather was able to observe flocks of thousands of parakeets in the natural landscapes, my grandfather saw flocks of a hundred, my father saw a few and I'm lucky if I can see two in the forests," Worthy said. 

The human-led decline of nature indicates that Earth would be a much wilder place without us, with some lost giants, such as moas, sticking out more than others. This group of ostrich-like birds, some of which stretched up to 11.8 feet (3.6 meters) tall, evolved in New Zealand over millions of years. Within 200 years of humans' arrival on these birds' lands 750 years ago, all nine species of moa were gone, along with at least 25 other vertebrate species, including the giant Haast's eagles (Hieraaetus moorei) that hunted the moas, according to Worthy. 

Giant moas and Haast's eagles are recent examples of large animals whose extinctions are definitively tied to human activities, such as unsustainable hunting and the introduction of invasive species into new habitats. They are also indicators of what our relationship with large animals may have been like elsewhere. 

The survival of large animals is critical for speculating about an Earth without humans, as these beasts have such a heavy impact on landscapes.  

Serengeti Earth

Sören Faurby, a senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, believes humans played a key role in the disappearance of many large mammals going back thousands of years. He led a 2015 study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, which suggested that, without humans, Earth would largely resemble the modern-day Serengeti, an African ecosystem teeming with life. 

Related: How long do most species last before going extinct?

In this scenario, extinct animals similar to those found in the Serengeti today — including elephants, rhinos and lions — would live across Europe. For example, instead of African lions (Panthera leo), there would still be cave lions (Panthera spelaea), a slightly larger species that lived in Europe up until about 12,000 years ago. Meanwhile, the Americas would be home to elephant relatives and massive bears, along with unique species, like car-size armadillo relatives called Glyptodon and giant ground sloths, according to Faurby.

"In a world without humans, there would be a much bigger diversity of large mammals, and if you see a larger diversity of large mammals, you tend to see a much more open habitat," Faurby told Live Science. 

Elephants and other large animals are pretty determined when finding food and won't stand for unnecessary obstructions. "If you're big enough, then it might be easier to just knock over a tree and eat the fresh leaves on top," Faurby said. But also, if there are a ton of large mammals, there tends to be less wooded vegetation emerging in the first place, he added. 

The hairy elephant in the room

Large animals, like elephants, are known as megafauna. During the last ice age of the Pleistocene, (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), the world was rich in megafauna, but most died out as the ice age ended, or in the millennia since. For instance, about 38 genera of large animals went extinct in North America at the end of the last ice age, according to a 2020 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For the past century, scientists have debated whether natural climate changes or human activities, such as overhunting, was the main cause of these large animals' decline.  

A 2021 study published in the journal Nature concluded that climate change ultimately wiped out woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) and other Arctic-dwelling megafauna that survived the end of the Pleistocene, as the warming climate made it too wet for the vegetation they ate to survive. 

Humans did, however, hunt mammoths. Scientists who think that humans were probably the key factor in their extinction, like Faurby, argue that mammoths survived climate changes before humans came along and likely could have survived to the present day were it not for the additional pressure humans placed on them.

Related: How would just 2 degrees of warming change the planet? 

Christopher Doughty, an associate professor and ecosystem ecologist at Northern Arizona University, models how large animals of the past and present move seeds and nutrients around through eating and defecating. His work suggests that the transportation of elements such as phosphorus, calcium and magnesium, which are critical for life, have declined by more than 90% through the extinction of large animals. 

Doughty hypothesizes that without humans, elements would be more evenly distributed across the landscape. This would mean more fertile soil, which would cause ecosystems to be more productive. "If the elements are more patchy in ecosystems, the productivity is going to be more patchy," Doughty said. 

Humans tend to clump elements together through practices such as agriculture and the creation of fenced-off areas, so these areas become less fertile over time compared with wild systems, according to Doughty. Greater fertility means plants can allocate their resources toward more fruits and flowers, so the world could look more vibrant and feed more animals.  

The climate might also be different, and while it's difficult to say how humans and megafauna may have influenced climatic changes thousands of years ago with evidence obscured by time, it's much easier to judge our impact on Earth's climate today. Through global warming, caused by activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, humans have raised the average global temperature by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) since the beginning of the 20th century. Earth, therefore, would have been at least that much cooler without us. 

A 2016 study published in Nature concluded that human-caused warming will postpone an upcoming ice age by at least 100,000 years. It wasn't due for another 50,000 years, though, even without the human delay, so it's unlikely that Earth would be in the midst of another ice age today if we weren't around.

Humans are inevitable

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) as we are today were not always the only hominins on the block, and removing us from the equation might have opened the door for our Neanderthal cousins. Scientists aren't sure why Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago, but because they interbred with H. sapiens, parts of their DNA live on in some of us. There were likely multiple reasons for Neanderthals' demise, but we are a main suspect.

Chris Stringer, a professor and research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, thinks competition for resources was a factor in Neanderthals' disappearance. "If we hadn't been around, if we hadn't come into Europe 45,000 or 50,000 years ago, I think they probably would still be here," he told Live Science. 

Related: What if Neanderthals had not gone extinct?

According to Stringer, Neanderthals were leading complex lives in Europe, similar to modern humans, but they had difficulty coping with climate changes and were relatively few in number, with low genetic diversity. This is bad news for any species, as it's a sign of inbreeding and ill health. Neanderthals were likely "already in trouble, and when modern humans got there as well, I think that may have been what tipped them over the edge," Stringer said. 

But it wasn't just Neanderthals that humans may have held back. Scientists are still learning about at least one more human lineage that lived around the same time as modern humans and Neanderthals: the Denisovans. This lineage appears to be closer to Neanderthals than modern humans in genes and appearance, but is distinguishable from Neanderthals by its very large molars.

Humans likely interbred with Denisovans as there is evidence of Denisovan DNA in present-day humans living in places such as New Guinea in Oceania — a finding that indicates Denisovans were in Southeast Asia interacting with the ancestors of modern humans that later settled further east, according to a 2012 study published in journal Science. Denisovans also partnered with Neanderthals in Siberia, where the fossilized remains of a Denisovan-Neanderthal hybrid were found, Live Science previously reported. 

These Denisovan interactions, along with fossil evidence, suggests that they had a larger geographic range than Neanderthals, encompassing a greater variety of environments, and therefore, arguably, were more widely adapted than the Neanderthals. DNA evidence also suggests that the Denisovans probably had greater genetic diversity than Neanderthals did, according to Stringer. "They might have been an even better bet for survival than the Neanderthals." 

Neanderthals and Denisovans matter, because if one or both of these lineages survived, they could have carved a similar path to what H. sapiens ultimately forged, moving from hunter-gathering when the last ice age ended to developing agriculture. 

"There's no reason why Neanderthals or Denisovans couldn't have done that eventually, given enough time," Stringer said. They may have overcome any potential intellectual shortcomings, which it's not clear they had, through evolution, he added. So maybe the world wouldn't look so different after all. 

"And equally, they could be making all the same mistakes we've made ever since," Stringer said. "So, global warming could have still been here, but with Neanderthals or Denisovans driving it, not us. Who knows?"

Originally published on Live Science.

Ivory poaching in Africa drove the rapid evolution of tuskless elephants in some regions, but the good news is that increased protections from poachers are helping the pachyderms get their tusks back. 

"In African elephants, tusklessness is very rare," said Brian Arnold, a biomedical data scientist at Princeton University. "But if you look in particular areas, the rate of tusklessness is much higher than average."

To find out why, Arnold and his co-author Shane Campbell-Staton, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. In the 1970s, aerial surveys showed about 2,500 elephants lived in the park. Using photos taken during the surveys, Arnold and his colleagues estimated that during that time, roughly 18% of the population lacked both of their tusks, while 9% were missing only one. 

Related: Genetics by the numbers: 10 tantalizing tales

In 1977, the aerial surveys stopped due to the outbreak of the Mozambican Civil War, which lasted until 1992. When population surveys resumed in 2000, the conflict's toll on Gorongosa's elephant population was clear: Fewer than 250 elephants remained in the park, and of the survivors, over 50% lacked tusks, a nearly threefold increase in the trait. 

Arnold suspects much of the population decline during the war was a direct result of poachers killing elephants, since both sides relied heavily on the ivory trade to finance their war efforts. However, elephants migrating away from the area could have also contributed to the overall decline, he said. 

"There was clearly a survival advantage for tuskless elephants," he said. Tusks are typically important for an elephant's survival, as they help them dig for underground water sources and strip the bark from trees, which is an important part of an elephant's diet. But when elephants are hunted for their tusks, this beneficial trait becomes a death sentence. 

As they sifted through data, the researchers noticed an interesting pattern: All of the tuskless elephants are female. To understand why, Arnold and colleagues observed the first generation born from the war survivors. For each calf, they recorded whether it had tusks, and then whether its parents had tusks. 

On average, they found, 50% of daughters born to a tuskless mother will be tuskless just like her, but all male calves will have tusks. In addition, instead of having male and female calves at a nearly equal frequency, two-thirds of a tuskless mother's calves will be female. 

According to Arnold, this pattern suggests that the gene that causes tusklessness is carried on the X chromosome, meaning it is an X-linked dominant trait. Female elephants, like humans, have two X chromosomes. So if one of those X chromosomes carries a mutant tuskless gene while there is a normal gene on the other X chromosome, the female calf will fail to develop tusks. But to survive, the other X chromosome needs to have the normal version of the gene so it can counteract the mutant one to some degree. In this case, one mutant gene is enough to interfere with tusk development, but otherwise, the elephant is reasonably healthy. 

Related: Photos: Stunning shots of the natural world and wildlife

Because a mother has a 50-50 chance of passing on either the normal or mutant gene to her offspring, the probability that a daughter of hers will be tuskless essentially comes down to a coin toss. For her sons, things are a bit riskier. Because the male embryos will get only one X chromosome from the mother to go with the Y chromosome they get from their father, inheriting the X chromosome with the mutant gene is a death sentence. The Y chromosome doesn't carry the same genes as X, so it will never have that much needed backup gene to counteract the tuskless gene. And having only the mutant gene is invariably fatal. So half of male embryos — those who inherit the tuskless X — will die before birth, explaining the lopsided sex ratio in the offspring of tuskless moms.

The researchers identified two potential genes that may cause tusklessness, AMELX and MEP1a. One of those genes, AMELX,is involved in mammalian tooth development. In humans, this gene plays a role in the development of lateral incisors, the teeth that elephant tusks evolved from. And intriguingly, in humans this gene is also linked to the development of an X-linked dominant syndrome that is lethal in males. This means much the same thing for human males that it does for male elephants: males that inherit the mutant version on one X chromosome don't have a backup. 

"In theory, as tusklessness becomes more common, fertility will decline," as tuskless females pass on a lethal syndrome to half their male offspring, Arnold said. 

"There is a bright spot to this story," Arnold said. "Since 1994, elephant populations have been on the rise in Mozambique." At the same time, tusklessness is on the decline, likely due to the fact that tuskless mothers are less fertile. This suggests that the elephants of Gorongosa National Park are on track to return to their former tusked glory. 

Originally published on Live Science.

More than a dozen young elephants — newborns, toddlers and teens — gamboled through mud in an ice age elephant "nursery" in southwestern Spain more than 100,000 years ago, according to new analysis of tracks that the youngsters left behind.

Scientists examined 34 sets of tracks belonging to straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) — extinct relatives of modern elephants — at a site known as the Matalascañas Trampled Surface in Huelva, on the Iberian Peninsula. As the name implies, this was a high-traffic area for a short period of time during the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to about 11,700 years ago), when diverse animals, including Neanderthals, crisscrossed the surface. 

The presence of Neanderthal footprints — adult and juvenile — hint that they may have visited the nursery to hunt vulnerable elephants, preying on calves, targeting females in labor "or opportunistically scavenging stillbirths and females dead from birth," according to a new study.

Related: Photos: Finding elephant tracks in the desert

Most of the elephant tracks at the site belonged to youngsters, which were accompanied by several young adult females. Only two tracks were thought to have been made by adult males, suggesting that the area was a reproductive habitat primarily occupied by females and their young. The dense concentration of elephant tracks provides "evidence of a snapshot of social behavior, especially parental care," the researchers reported.

Straight-tusked elephants "were one of the most impressive species of elephant that ever lived," said lead study author Carlos Neto de Carvalho, a geologist and scientific coordinator of Naturtejo Global Geopark, a protected territory in inland Portugal containing geologic features that are recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

These elephants stood over 13 feet (4 meters) tall at the shoulder and weighed up to 17 tons (15 metric tons). Biologists who study modern elephants can estimate an animal's size, age and body mass based on the size, shape and depth of tracks, and Neto de Carvalho and his colleagues applied the same methods to the ice age tracks, he told Live Science in an email. 

Most of the young elephants that produced the site's smallest tracks were "quite tiny," he said. Their estimated shoulder heights were just 24 inches (60 centimeters), and they would have weighed about 155 pounds (70 kilograms). 

The Matalascañas Trampled Surface is usually blanketed by several feet of beach sand, which is "wonderful for the tourists visiting the coast of Andaluzia, but terrible for very curious paleontologists," Neto de Carvalho said. However, spring storm surges in 2020 washed away sand and uncovered a vast area covered with thousands of tracks and trackways. 

Of those, hundreds were oval footprints associated with elephants and their close relatives, measuring from 3.8 to 21.5 inches (9.6 to 54.5 cm) in diameter. For the study, the scientists described tracks that they could definitively link to individual straight-tusked elephants, Neto de Carvalho said. There were 15 babies under 2 years old; eight youngsters between 2 and 7 years old; six adolescents ages 8 to 15 years; and five adults aged 15 years or older.

In modern elephants, social groups are sexually segregated. They typically revolve around a matriarchal family made up of related females caring for their young, with males leaving a group when they become sexually mature (around age 14 or 15) and then returning to female-led groups to mate, the scientists wrote in the study. Matalascañas, which had seasonal ponds and nutritious vegetation, would have been a perfect spot for an elephant nursery because young elephants need to drink frequently and can't travel as far as adults can, so female-led groups usually stick close to water.

Other coastal dune sites in Portugal that preserve straight-tusked elephant tracks also show that herds were small and made up of females and offspring. All of these trackways were found at sites "with ages over 100,000 years to at least 70,000 years ago, so matriarchal herds of straight-tusked elephants have been visiting the coastal areas for thousands of years," Neto de Carvalho said. 

"In the case of Matalascañas, there is good ecological evidence for the behavioral purpose of such visits," he added. "They were giving birth close to small freshwater lakes and ponds in an open landscape, where predators of the newborn could be controlled from afar."

However, Neanderthal footprints — and stone tools that were also found at the site— suggest that elephant families may not have been able to evade hungry human predators. Preserved evidence from other locations hints that elephants and their relatives, "especially young individuals," were a major part of the Neanderthal diet, according to the study. A coastal nursery such as Matalascañas, where newborns, calves and vulnerable females were plentiful, could have been a seasonal elephant buffet for Neanderthals, the researchers reported. 

The findings were published Sept. 16 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Originally published on Live Science.

An injured baby elephant that was abandoned by its herd in China has been rescued by a local animal rescue group, according to recent news reports.

The youngster is likely part of a herd of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) that became famous in June after the group made an unusually long trek across Yunnan province, according to the French news agency AFP. The herd set off last year from their nature reserve near China's southwest border with Myanmar and journeyed more than 310 miles (500 kilometers) to Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province.

On Saturday (July 10), locals discovered that the pack had left an injured baby elephant that was born during that trek, according to AFP. They found the baby elephant, which weighed around 397 pounds (180 kilograms), alone on a tea plantation with an infected leg injury. Local rescuers applied disinfectant to the baby elephant's leg and brought the animal to a rescue center. They also gave the animal antibacterial and anti-inflammatory drugs.

Related: Elephant images: Largest land animals

"It's possible that something like rattan spines pricked it and the injuries slowly became infected," Bao Mingwei, director of the Asian Elephant Breeding and Rescue Center, told CCTV, as reported by AFP.

The baby elephant's injury could have been life-threatening without treatment, state broadcaster CCTV reported, according to AFP. But with proper care, the elephant should recover, Mingwei said.

Authorities have been monitoring the elephant herd 24 hours a day, using both ground-based surveys and flying drones, according to The Guardian. The pack became famous, and millions tuned in to livestreams of the animals as they trekked across southwest China, according to CNN.

The troop posed problems for local people, trampling crops and causing more than $1 million in damage. The elephants also stole food from villagers and forced evacuations along their path, according to AFP. 

It's not clear why the elephants left their nature reserve in the first place; some experts have proposed that shrinking rainforest habitats are to blame, while others suspect the pack is just lost, according to CNN. Agriculture has shrunk elephant habitats over the past few decades, leading many of the animals to search for food elsewhere, according to CNN. 

"The traditional buffer zones between humans and elephants are gradually disappearing, and the chances of elephants' encountering humans naturally increase greatly," Zhang Li, a wildlife biologist and professor at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times, a Chinese news outlet.

The country's wild elephant population has doubled since the 1990s, according to Time magazine. But China's elephant habitat has shrunk by nearly two-thirds since then.

Originally published on Live Science.

Elephants' trunks suck a lot — and that's a good thing. Powerful suction allows elephants to deftly grasp small and delicate pieces of food, even fragile tortilla chips that would otherwise be crushed or fumbled by the grip of their muscular trunks.

High-speed video recently revealed that this suction success stems from the forcefulness of elephant inhalation. Researchers calculated that elephants can inhale at speeds of over 336 mph (540 km/h), which is more than 30 times the speed of expelled air during a human sneeze (about 10 mph or 16 km/h) and faster than a Japan Rail bullet train (199 mph or 320 km/h, according to Japan Rail).

Their trunks can also hold more than you might think. An elephant can expand its trunk's diameter by dilating its nostrils; this reduces the thickness of the trunk's inner walls and increases the space inside by about 64%, according to a new study.

Related: Photos: Finding elephant tracks in the desert

An elephant's trunk — despite weighing a whopping 220 pounds (100 kilograms) — is capable of performing unexpectedly dainty tasks: from painting "self-portraits" to grasping cereal flakes by pinching them in the trunk's tip, Live Science previously reported. 

Prior research showed that elephants can blow air through their trunks to manipulate food that's just beyond their reach, and the authors of the new study wondered if elephants also used their trunks like personal vacuum cleaners to suck up tasty treats, as they do when they suck up water or dust to spray over themselves, according to lead study author Andrew Schulz, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. 

"A loud vacuuming sound" 

Using three video cameras, the scientists recorded experiments with a 34-year-old female African elephant at the Zoo Atlanta, presenting her with tortilla chips and cubed pieces of rutabaga. Next, they recorded video and collected ultrasound measurements of the elephant's trunk as it slurped water from an aquarium. The study authors then calculated trunk capacity and pressure using data from their observations and from trunk measurements of the Zoo Atlanta elephant, and of a frozen trunk borrowed from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The elephant inhaled to lift multiple small objects as well as single items. When there were more than 10 small pieces of rutabaga on the table, the elephant used suction to pick them up, producing "a loud vacuuming sound," the study authors reported. For the more delicate chips, the elephant used suction in two ways: sucking up the chip from a distance, or pressing her trunk directly on the chip first, then applying suction to lift it from the table. These chip-lifting efforts were remarkably gentle, the scientists reported.

"Even after repeated attempts, the elephant could usually pick it up without breaking it," the researchers wrote. 

Aquarium experiments further demonstrated the speed of the elephant's mighty inhalation, with pre-soaked chia seeds in the water helping to show the liquid's flow. The elephant hoovered up nearly a gallon (4 liters) of liquid in 1.5 seconds, which initially seemed like more liquid than a trunk could reasonably hold, Schulz said

"At first, it didn't make sense: An elephant's nasal passage is relatively small, and it was inhaling more water than it should," he said in a statement. "It wasn't until we saw the ultrasonographic images and watched the nostrils expand that we realized how they did it. Air makes the walls open, and the animal can store far more water than we originally estimated."

Elephants can suction feed because their specialized respiratory system accommodates unusually high lung pressure, which generates air velocity that is unmatched among land animals, the study authors wrote. For instance, human lungs can generate barely enough suction to elevate "a small piece of paper," and a person trying to lift a tortilla chip by inhaling would have to position their nose no more than 0.02 inches (0.4 millimeters) from the target, according to the study.

Even then, a human probably couldn't suck hard enough to do the job, as "any fluid leaks between the chip and nose would make lifting infeasible," the scientists wrote.

The findings were published online June 2 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Originally published on Live Science.

The first humans were mega-carnivores who took down prey with savvy hunting skills, a controversial new study suggests.

In a new research paper, scientists argue that humans and their close relatives were expert hunters from early on, starting at least 2 million years ago. Not only that, but the earliest human species were superpredators, taking down animals twice as large as any terrestrial creature alive today, said Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai, researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and Raphael Sirtoli, a doctoral student at the University of Minho in Portugal.

"So far, attempts to reconstruct the diet of Stone Age humans were mostly based on comparisons to 20th-century hunter-gatherer societies," Ben-Dor said in a statement. "This comparison is futile, however, because 2 million years ago, hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals — while today's hunter-gatherers do not have access to such bounty. The entire ecosystem has changed, and conditions cannot be compared."

Related: 15 of the largest animals of their kind on Earth

A limited record 

Fossil evidence from the earliest human ancestors is scarce. But based on archaeological evidence, Ben-Dor told Live Science, it's clear that Homo sapiens and their close relatives ate "anything edible." But how much of their diets comprised plants versus animals is the sticking point. (Another sticking point: When did humans start hunting meat themselves, rather than scavenging it?) Many animals considered omnivorous actually have diets weighted one way or another. Chimpanzees, for example, are technically omnivores, but meat makes up only about 6% of their diets, according to the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada. Dogs and wolves eat mostly meat but sometimes gorge on grains, leading to a debate over whether they should be classified as omnivores or carnivores.

The ancient human species Homo habilis was eating meat at least 2.6 million years ago, Ben-Dor said. Another early human species, Homo erectus, seems to have been a particularly enthusiastic meat eater by 1.8 million years ago; its teeth and gut shrank compared with earlier ancestors — adaptations for digesting meat instead of plants — and it used stone tools capable of butchering meat.

Ben-Dor and Barkai argue in their paper, published March 5 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, that meat wasn't just a bonus for these human species and the first Homo sapiens. Instead, the authors believe large animals weighing over 2,200 lbs. (1,000 kilograms) — such as elephants, hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses — made up most of humans' diets. These huge herbivores were much more common — and much larger — in the Pleistocene epoch, starting about 2.5 million years ago, than they are today. .

"Elephants 500,000 years ago could weigh 12 tons, compared to 4 to 6 tons today," Ben-Dor said.

These animals would have been walking buffets of fatty meat, well suited to feeding humans' energy-hungry brains, according to the researchers. The authors argued in another recent paper that hunting large prey might have been what drove human brain evolution.

This idea is controversial, however, and researchers do not agree on how useful a huge influx of meat would have been to hunter-gatherers in the days before refrigeration, nor on how skilled ancient humans would have been at taking down prey that other apex carnivores, like lions, struggle to defeat. 

"There are some archaeologists who'd say, 'Yeah, they hunted elephant once in a while, but that was like a once-in-a-lifetime hunt; that's the thing grandparents would tell their kids stories about,'" said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the research. "There are others who said 'No, meat from an elephant can last a long time. … Without storage, it's less than you think, but it was a regular part of their subsistence, and it was important to them.'" 

 A fatty diet? 

Eating large, fatty animals would have been a benefit to the earliest humans, Ben-Dor and his colleagues wrote in their paper, because bringing down that many calories in one hunting trip — rather than multiple attempts to stalk smaller prey —— would have freed up time for other pursuits, such as toolmaking and child-rearing. The researchers argue that humans show adaptations for this high-fat, meat-heavy life, ranging from particularly acidic stomach juices (also found in other animals with meat-heavy diets) to small jaws (because meat eaters have to chew less than herbivores that must break down large amounts of fibrous vegetation for the same calories).

Archaeologically speaking, it's difficult to categorize humans and their relatives as one level of predator prior to about 50,000 years ago, Ben-Dor said. That's because the only reliable biochemical way to distinguish whether an animal is a top predator or fits lower on the food chain is a method called stable nitrogen isotope analysis, which requires testing collagen for molecules introduced into the body via the diet. Consumers contain a few percentage points more of the isotope nitrogen-15 than what is found in either the plants or animals they eat, making it possible to determine their level in the food web, also known as their trophic level.

Collagen, the connective tissue found in abundance in bones, doesn't preserve well prior to 50,000 years ago, though. The samples from that era hail from Europe, where cooler temperatures allow for better preservation, and they do indicate that humans were eating large mammals. However, 50,000 years ago in Europe is a far cry from 300,000 years ago in Africa, when and where the first H. sapiens arose, Hawks said.

Adding to the difficulties in determining ancient humans' diets, it's hard to determine precise dates for archaeological materials from the crucial time periods in the middle Pleistocene, when human diets were evolving, Hawks added. 

"This is a time frame when our ability to determine the age of things relies on methods that have about a 100,000-year, sometimes 50,000-year, span of uncertainty about them. … That's a lot of error," Hawks told Live Science. And there are far fewer sites to make inferences from that are older than 100,000 years compared with those younger than 100,000 years, he said. 

Despite the limited evidence from humanity's early evolution, the researchers said there is more work to be done to show whether these human ancestors truly were specialized carnivores. This might include more work on the abundance of animals of different sizes throughout the Pleistocene, explorations of genetic changes over time that would have altered humans' ability to digest different foods and comparisons of trends in prey size over time.

"I feel that we have only scratched the surface, exploring paleobiology's potential to discover our past and present adaptation to consuming meat and animal fat," Ben-Dor said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Which animal has the largest ears? You might think it's the elephant, and you'd be right — sort of. As the largest living land animal, the African elephant does have the biggest ears of any living animal, according to Mary Ellen Holden, a zoologist and mammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. But the creature with the largest ears relative to the size of its body is the long-eared jerboa (Euchoreutes naso), a nocturnal, insect-eating rodent that lives in the deserts of China and Mongolia. 

The long-eared jerboa (rhymes with Samoa) measures about 4 inches (10 centimeters) from head to rump (not counting its long tail). Its ears, measuring 1.5 to 2 inches (3.8 to 5 cm) long, are 40% to 50% the length of its body. 

"It has the longest ears relative to its body size in the entire animal kingdom," Holden told Live Science. For comparison, the ears of the African elephant average nearly 4 feet (1.2 m) in length, according to Holden, but that's only about 17% of their body length, which averages about 20 to 25 feet (6 to 7.5 m).   

Related: Why are ears shaped so strangely?

In 2007, the long-eared jerboa, which has rarely been seen on camera, made the news with a video taken during a Zoological Society of London trip to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. The critter is "a bit like the Mickey Mouse of the desert," expedition leader and conservation biologist Jonathan Baillie said, according to the video description.

Why such big ears? Large ears help the long-eared jerboa and other mammals living in hot, dry environments get rid of excess heat. "African elephants, fennec foxes, long-eared jerboas — they are able to thermoregulate by having rapid heat loss through the very highly vascularized ears," Holden said. These animals' ears are large and thin, and they house many tiny blood vessels, she said. While circulating through the ears, the blood releases heat into the air, thereby helping the animal cool off. 

When the animal is hot, the blood vessels in its ears expand to release even more heat, Holden said. At night, or whenever it's cold, the animals' blood vessels constrict to help keep them warm. 

"I think most people agree [that large ears] are generally correlated with warmer environments," Holden said. "And if you look at African and Asian elephants, African elephant ears are much larger than Asian elephant ears, because African elephants inhabit a hotter climate." Asian elephants' ears, measuring about 1.6 feet (0.5 m) long, make up only about 8% of their body length. 

As far as heat dissipation strategies go, using ears to cool off is a good adaptation to desert life. It serves as an alternative to sweating, allowing desert creatures to conserve water in an environment where that resource is scarce, according to Holden.   

Large ears may also help the long-eared jerboa detect the low-frequency sounds coming from its insect prey and its predators, Holden said.

Originally published on Live Science.

African elephants are the first animals to be successfully counted from space while moving through a complicated landscape that ranged from open grasses to forests. 

Researchers combined high-resolution images captured 372 miles (600 kilometers) above Earth's surface by the satellites Worldview 3 and 4, along with deep computer learning to count the number of elephants in Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa.

Typically, conservationists do this from low-flying planes in order to count and monitor African elephants (Loxodonta africana), a method that takes many hours. With the new technique that combines satellite imagery with artificial intelligence, up to 1,930 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) can be surveyed on a single blue-sky day in minutes. Then, the researchers' deep-learning computer algorithms analyze those images and pick out individual elephants. The results of this new proof-of-concept study showed the AI was as accurate as the human eye at spotting each elephant.

"While this is a proof of concept, it's ready to go," lead study author Isla Duporge, a zoologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K., told the BBC. "And conservation organizations are already interested in using this to replace surveys using aircraft."

Related: The most surprising elephant relatives on Earth

The new technique is a key part of ensuring the survival of this species, which is listed as endangered by the IUCN Red List, the world’s leading database surrounding extinction threats to wildlife created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Due to poaching and habitat destruction, just 415,000 African elephants roam the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

"Accurate monitoring is essential if we're to save the species," Olga Isupova, a computer scientist at the University of Bath in the U.K. who wrote the deep learning algorithms used in the study, said in a statement. "We need to know where the animals are and how many there are."  

 What really makes this study stand apart from other satellite-tracking projects is how successful the computer program was at picking out the elephants from their complex backgrounds — known in ecology as heterogeneous landscapes — including grasslands and partially tree-covered savannah. 

"This type of work has been done before with whales, but of course the ocean is all blue, so counting is a lot less challenging," Isupova said in the statement. 

Satellite imagery is a much more efficient survey method than the current flyover surveys carried out. Most importantly, it is faster and avoids double-counting the same elephants. The remote survey also reduces the impact researchers have on the animals and allows them to count individuals moving between countries, something that can be tricky to do from planes due to strict border control and areas of conflict, according to the statement. 

 It is also a survey method that will only get better with time.

"Satellite imagery resolution increases every couple of years, and with every increase, we will be able to see smaller things in greater detail," Isupova said in the statement.

As satellite imaging improves other smaller species may soon be able to be counted from space too. 

The study was published online Dec. 23, 2020, in the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation.

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to correct the conversion for the area they surveyed; it is 1,930 square miles (5,000 square km), not 3,100 square miles. In addition, the elephants are endangered, not vulnerable, according to ICUN.

A viral video shows a rescue worker in Thailand successfully reviving a baby elephant using CPR after the animal was struck by a motorbike while crossing a road in the southeastern province of Chanthaburi. 

After performing CPR, the rescuer, Mana Srivate, was able to get the elephant back on its feet, Reuters reported. But how did he manage to give CPR to such a large animal — and have it actually work? 

Related: The 10 weirdest medical cases in the animal kingdom

How do you give an elephant CPR?

To perform CPR on the elephant, of course, first Mana had to locate the elephant's heart. Based on the location of the human heart and a video clip he saw online, Mana "assumed" where the animal's heart was, according to the Reuters report. He then gave the calf chest compressions in much the same way you would for a human, except the elephant was lying on its side.

To perform CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) on a human, you place the heel of your hand on the breastbone at the center of the person's chest, put your other hand on top and interlock your fingers. Then, with your shoulders above your hands, you press straight down about 2 to 2.5 inches (5 to 6 centimeters), using your body weight. After releasing the compression, you repeat this motion at a rate of 100 to 120 times per minute until an ambulance arrives or you become exhausted, according to the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS). 

Instructions for elephant CPR are harder to come by. However, in a chapter in the book "Zoo Animal and Wildlife Immobilization and Anesthesia" (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014), Søren Boysen, a professor of veterinary clinical and diagnostic sciences at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, gives recommendations on how to perform CPR on animals. 

He advises placing mammals between about 22 and 220 pounds (10 to 100 kilograms) in "right lateral recumbency," which means on their right side, just like the elephant in the video. A newborn Asian elephant weighs about 200 pounds (90 kg), according to SeaWorld, which is within the weight range Boysen specified. Boysen then recommends doing compressions similar to those you would perform on a human — and that's also what Mana did. (An elephant's heart is about 0.5% of its body weight, according to the International Elephant Foundation, meaning this calf's heart would've been about a pound, or 0.5 kg.)

But what if the elephant had been an adult?  When fully grown, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) can weigh over 5.5 tons (5 metric tons), according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo, which could make things a bit more difficult, as the exact technique for animal CPR varies depending on the animal's size. For animals over 550 pounds (250 kg), Boysen pointed to research conducted on horses, in which the researchers achieved compressions by dropping from a standing or crouching position and striking the horse's chest with a knee, according to the study, published in 1993 in the Equine Veterinary Journal. 

The researchers found a compression rate of 80 strikes per minute resulted in the best improvement, although they also noted that this rate is quite physically demanding. Mana performed CPR on the elephant for 10 minutes before reviving it, according to the Reuters report. 

One training method to help reach the recommended compression rate in humans is to sing a song with that rate in your head while performing the compressions, Live Science previously reported. (In the U.S., the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" and Queen’s "Another One Bites the Dust" are popular picks.)

Ultimately, however, Mana was successful in reviving the baby elephant without using any musical aid. 

"It's my instinct to save lives, but I was worried the whole time, because I can hear the mother and other elephants calling for the baby," Mana told Reuters. 

The elephant was later reunited with its mother and suffered no serious injuries, according to the Reuters report. 

Originally published on Live Science.

A dog snoring away the afternoon on the living room floor. Walruses snoozing belly-up on a beach. Lions sprawled out on the Serengeti. A hippo dozing on a mudbank. 

These slumberous scenes may make folks wonder why these other mammals seem to be getting so much more sleep than humans. Do they actually need more sleep? Are they just sleeping because they can? Should humans be sleeping more, too?

Be prepared for a surprising and fascinating answer to these questions: 

Nobody knows.

Related: Can any animal survive without sleep?

Though constantly studied, sleep is one of the great mysteries modern science hasn't completely cracked. "We really don't know what sleep is for," Dr. David Raizen, associate professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, told Live Science.

Raizen said scientists have identified relationships between sleep and animal function — certain kinds of sleep can increase a critter's ability to fight off illness or consolidate memories. Yet these associations don't necessarily describe the ultimate purpose of sleep and can be misleading.

"A brown bat that sleeps 20 hours a day you'd think would be a genius," Raizen said, speaking to the idea that sleep is meant to serve learning and memory. Likewise, a 2017 study published in the journal PLOS One found that elephants sleep for an average of only two hours a night, but it's known elephants are intelligent animals with very good memories.

"This difference in sleep amounts has been used for arguments against a core function of sleep," Raizen said. How could sleep be so important if an animal like an elephant is perfectly functional with only two hours while a typical human needs quadruple that?

But Raizen thinks sleep does serve a core function, though an as-of-yet poorly understood one. Sleep has been observed in every animal ever studied by science, Raizen said, making it as universal across lifeforms as energy intake. Studies have also shown that various animals' bodies begin to break down if they're continuously sleep deprived, suggesting sleep is essential.

So if it's essential, why isn't more always better and the amount always similar, particularly across closely-related animals, like mammals?

One idea is that sleep in mammals has to do with body size and diet, according to a 2005 study in the journal Nature. Across many studies of mammalian sleep, scientists have observed that less sleep is correlated with larger body sizes, and this correlation is stronger and more extreme among herbivores than it is among carnivores.

A reason for this may be that the larger an animal is, the more calories it needs, and the more time it needs to spend eating. Herbivores tend to rely on food that is far less calorie-dense than the food carnivores eat so need to gulp down much more. This could partly explain why an elephant may have evolved to survive on only two hours a day, Raizen said.  

However, the matter is far from settled. Sleep is complex, hard to measure in wild animals and even harder to interpret.

Along those lines, it's important to remember that some differences in observed sleep might not be what they seem. Just because a house cat sleeps for 18 hours a day doesn't mean it needs all that sleep to function, Raizen said. Some sleep is probably a matter of convenience — done when it's not safe for an animal to be out and about, when food availability is low or simply because there's nothing else to do. 

As for human sleep? Raizen said the most important thing is for people to listen to their bodies and get as much sleep as they feel they need — which is about eight hours for most folks but might be as few as five and as many as 11.

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists in Botswana may finally know why more than 350 elephants have mysteriously dropped dead in the country's Okavango Delta wetlands since May. The culprit — or one of them, anyway — appears to be neurotoxins spread by thriving colonies of bacteria living in the region's water holes.

"Our latest tests have detected cyanobacterial neurotoxins to be the cause of deaths," Mmadi Reuben, principal veterinary officer at the Botswana department of wildlife and national parks, said during a news conference Monday (Sept. 21). "However, we have many questions still to be answered, such as why the elephants only and why that area only."

More than 70% of the fallen elephants were found near water sources polluted with large amounts of cyanobacteria — a single-cell organism also known as blue-green algae, named for their tendency to clump together in large green mats or "blooms" on aquatic surfaces. These blooms can be hazardous or even deadly, harboring toxins that attack the nervous system, skin or liver of animals exposed to them. Toxic cyanobacteria blooms have previously caused the mass dieoffs of fish, birds and other animals, according to a 2008 study in the journal Global Change Biology.

Cyanobacteria use photosynthesis to make food from sunlight. This means they often thrive during summer heat waves when they can outcompete other types of algae, according to the 2008 study. As global climate change increases the frequency and severity of heat waves (2020 brought the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere), algal blooms are becoming more widespread, and so have their toxins.

According to Reuben, the Botswana government's investigation revealed "a combination of neurotoxins" in the watering holes near the dead elephants. While no other species seem to have fallen victim to these toxins (save for one horse), it's possible that the elephants are particularly susceptible because they spend a lot of time bathing in the holes and drinking large quantities of water from them, Live Science previously reported.

Tissue samples taken from the affected elephants are still being analyzed by lab partners in the United States, U.K. and South Africa, Reuben added. Niall McCann, director of conservation at U.K.-based charity National Park Rescue, told The Guardian that officials should refrain from drawing any conclusions until those results are in.

"Just because cyanobacteria were found in the water, that does not prove that the elephants died from exposure to those toxins," McCann said. "Without good samples from dead elephants, all hypotheses are just that: hypotheses."

One hypothesis that has already been ruled out: poaching. All 350 elephants were found with tusks intact, suggesting that ivory poachers were not responsible. That's reassuring, as Botswana supports a population of about 130,000 elephants, more than any other country in Africa, according to the African Wildlife Foundation. The delta where these carcasses were found is home to about 15,000 of those elephants.

Originally published on Live Science.

A zoo in Poland plans to test cannabidiol — also known as CBD, a chemical found in cannabis — on its elephants, for stress relief.

According to the BCC, the Warsaw Zoo's decision follows the March death of Erna, the elder elephant in the herd. Elephants are matriarchal, meaning older females lead the herd, so it's no surprise that the three younger elephants have shown signs of stress since her death. Zookeepers hope the CBD will help calm the tense animals; elephants get stressed out easily and are relatively easy for the zoo to keep an eye on, so they're good candidates for testing the substance, which is touted for its calming effect on humans, the zoo told BBC.

As Live Science previously reported, CBD is one of a range of chemicals found only in cannabis plants. But unlike tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), marijuana's main psychoactive ingredient, CBD doesn't cause humans to get high

Related: 25 odd facts about marijuana 

CBD is an increasingly popular substance in the natural wellness industry, and there's anecdotal evidence to suggest it's effective for treating anxiety and other ailments. Proponents of the compound have hailed CBD's healing effects for a wide range of physical and mental illnesses, such as depression and cancer. However, due to U.S. laws regulating the production, use and testing of marijuana products, research on the effects of CBD is limited, although one clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 did find that CBD reduced seizures in people with Dravet syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy. As Live Science reported, some early studies have suggested that CBD may work to combat anxiety, and psychosis, while others indicated that it's no more effective than a placebo.

And, of course, all that research describes the effect of CBD on humans. No research yet exists to indicate how the cannabinoid will impact elephants, though CBD companies do make products targeting dogs and cats according to the American Kennel Club, and research into veterinary use of the substance is ongoing.

Moreover, scientists at Tarleton State University’s Equine Center in Texas are giving horses CBD to see whether the substance affects inflammation, stress and problematic behaviors in these animals, according to a statement from Texas A&M University. Results are expected to come out as soon as next year.

The plan at the Warsaw Zoo is to first treat Fredzia, a younger elephant who had the strongest reaction to Erna's death, according to the BBC. Researchers at the zoo have already collected feces, saliva and blood from the animals to measure their levels of cortisol, a chemical associated with stress, before the CBD trial. Scientists will keep monitoring cortisol levels in the elephants as they feed Fredzia — and eventually the other elephants — the cannabinoid, the BBC reported

Originally published on Live Science.

A teensy animal, with a long nose, a fur tuft on its tail and big, spectacled eyes hadn't been seen in nearly half a century. That is, until a whiff of peanut butter lured the wee mouse-sized mammal out from the rocky, rugged lands of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.

The recently "rediscovered" mammal, called a Somali sengi (Elephantulus revoilii), is a species of elephant shrew. While elephant shrews are related to elephants, aardvarks and manatees — they're not elephants and they're not shrews.

The Somali sengi has not been seen since 1973. Everything known about the obscure mini mammal came from 39 individual specimens that were collected decades and centuries ago and that are now stored in museums, according to a statement from Global Wildlife Conservation. 

Related: The world's 6 smallest mammals

In 2019, a group of scientists from the U.S. and Djibouti set out to look for the species after receiving tips that the creatures could be hiding in Djibouti, although the animals had only previously been found in Somalia, according to the statement. 

"For us living in Djibouti, and by extension the Horn of Africa, we never considered the sengis to be 'lost,' but this new research does bring the Somali sengi back into the scientific community, which we value," co-author Houssein Rayaleh, a research ecologist and conservationist with the nonprofit organization Association Djibouti Nature, said in the statement. Rayaleh had seen the creature before — and locals had too, correctly identifying it in photos during interviews with the scientists, according to the statement.

Using information from interviews, analysis of dung piles at candidate sites and assessments of terrain and sheltering potential, the researchers set up 1,259 traps at 12 different locations across the rocky terrain. They lured the animals to the traps by setting out peanut butter, oatmeal and yeast. They caught one of the elusive mammals in the first trap they set.

In total, they found 12 Somali sengis, which they could distinguish from a similar species by the tuft of fur on their tails, according to the statement. "For Djibouti, this is an important story that highlights the great biodiversity of the country and the region and shows that there are opportunities for new science and research here," Rayaleh said.

They found all of sengis by rocky outcrops and relatively sparse vegetation, areas that are typically inhospitable to human activities, meaning the tiny creatures are not likely to experience habitat destruction, according to the statement. Because they found comparable numbers to other sengi taxa and because they now know that the creatures live beyond just Somalia, the authors recommended that the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species change the Somali sengi's current "data deficient" status to "least concern," according to the statement. 

"Usually when we rediscover lost species, we find just one or two individuals and have to act quickly to try to prevent their imminent extinction," Robin Moore, one of GWC's Search for Lost Species program leads, said in the statement. "This is a welcome and wonderful rediscovery during a time of turmoil for our planet, and one that fills us with renewed hope for the remaining small mammal species on our most wanted list." (GWC crafted a list of 25 of the most wanted "lost" species.)

The findings were published today (Aug. 18) in the journal PeerJ.

Originally published on Live Science.

In this episode of Life's Little Mysteries, we'll take a closer look at a mysterious animal from a family that's been around for millions of years. It's the biggest land animal alive today: the elephant.

How big can elephants get, and how sensitive are their trunks? How intelligent are elephants, and do they really get plastered on fermented fruit and go on drunken rampages? Listen to Life's Little Mysteries Episode 46: Mysterious Elephants, to find out! 

You'll also hear about how elephants' big brains shape their behavior, and how understanding elephant cognition and psychology could help people protect these giants and even coexist with elephants in the wild. 

Co-hosts: Jeanna Bryner and Mindy Weisberger

Guest: Joshua Plotnik, assistant professor of psychology at Hunter College, The City University of New York

Listen to Life's Little Mysteries, Episode 46: Mysterious Elephants below or on Audioboom, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so you don’t miss out on new episodes.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for even more Life's Little Mysteries, and catch up on the latest Life's Little Mysteries articles. You can also join the conversation in our forums, where you can pose Life's Little Mysteries questions of your own, or even suggest topics for upcoming podcast episodes. 

Originally published on Live Science.

More than 350 elephants in Botswana have mysteriously died since May, in a phenomenon that some scientists have dubbed a "conservation disaster," and one that has evaded explanation.

The elephants — which died in the swampy Okavango Delta — still had their tusks intact, suggesting that ivory poaching hadn't driven the deaths, The Guardian reported. A flight over the delta in May by researchers with Elephants Without Borders, a wildlife conservation organization, first spotted 169 carcasses; that number jumped to 356 in June, when the conservationists took another flight over the area.

Botswana's Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation, and Tourism has verified 275 of those elephant carcasses, according to a statement from the African Wildlife Foundation.

Related: Elephant images: The biggest beasts on land

The mass die-off could be explained by either a poison or some as-yet unknown pathogen, according to The Guardian. Already, officials have ruled out anthrax,  the carcasses tested negative for that bacterium, said Scott Schlossberg, a research consultant for Elephants Without Borders. 

The bacterium that causes anthrax disease, called Bacillus anthracis, occurs naturally in soils, where it can stay inactive as spores for decades, scientists reported in 2019 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Grazing animals can ingest anthrax-tainted soils along with plants or while drinking from watering holes. 

This isn't the first elephant die-off in the region; more than 100 elephants died over a two-month period in the fall of 2019 in Botswana's Chobe National Park, primarily driven by drought. Some of those deaths may have been due to anthrax, as the elephants would have ingested soil (possibly contaminated with anthrax spores) while grazing around dried-up watering holes and across wilted grasslands, the AFP reported at the time.

What's behind the recent deaths?

Local sources told The Guardian that 70% of the elephant carcasses — which span all ages — have been found around watering holes, so perhaps the culprit is somehow linked to watering holes, The Guardian reported. Also, locals have reported that some of the elephants were walking in circles before their deaths, suggesting a neurological issue. 

"If you look at the carcasses, some of them have fallen straight on their face, indicating they died very quickly," Niall McCann, director of conservation at the U.K.-based conservation organization National Park Rescue, told The Guardian. "Others are obviously dying more slowly, like the ones that are wandering around. So it's very difficult to say what this toxin is."

Related: In photos: The most surprising elephant relatives on Earth

Another idea, though unlikely, is cyanide, which poachers often use to poison elephants. However, in the case of cyanide poisoning, the elephants are generally clustered in one area where the poison was deployed, and other animals scavenging on their carcasses also show up dead, The New York Times reported. This hasn't been the case in Botswana.

Rather than foul play, the elephants might have died from a natural culprit, said Chris Thouless, the head of research at the conservation organization Save the Elephants, which is based in Kenya, The New York Times reported. Thouless suggested the viral disease encephalomyocarditis, which is transmitted by rodents, could be to blame. The disease causes neurological impairment and is known to have killed 60 elephants in South Africa's Kruger National Park in the mid-1990s, according to a report published in 1995 in the Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research.

He added that Botswana recently emerged from a drought, which can leave elephants stressed and more susceptible to diseases. 

Conservation disaster?

Botswana supports a population of about 130,000 elephants, more than in any other country in Africa, according to the African Wildlife Foundation. The delta where these carcasses were found is home to about 15,000 of those elephants, according to The Guardian. 

The loss of hundreds of elephants (a number that could climb if the culprit isn't discovered and addressed soon) may impact the country's ecotourism, which relies on elephants and other wildlife, and contributes 10% to 12% of Botswana's GDP, The Guardian reported. 

"You see elephants as assets of the country. They are the diamonds wandering around the Okavango delta," said McCann, as reported by The Guardian. "It's a conservation disaster — it speaks of a country that is failing to protect its most valuable resource."

Thouless disagrees with the idea that these deaths represent a "conservation disaster," pointing to the fact that the deaths represent such a small percentage of the delta's total population. 

However, that number could climb if the cause isn't determined and mitigated. As for whether or not the mortality is continuing, the last time we flew over the area in mid-June, we were still finding very fresh carcasses from elephants that had died a few days to a few weeks previously," Schlossberg told Live Science. "So, the mortality appears to have been continuing into June. We would not be surprised if elephants were still dying, but we would need to do another survey to confirm this."

Slow response?

Experts contacted by The Guardian were concerned by how slowly the official investigation of the deaths is proceeding. The Botswana government has yet to get, or release, results from lab tests on the carcasses and the surrounding environment. 

Related: Incredible photos capture last glimpse of long-tusked 'elephant queen'

"Toxicological tests of elephant remains, water and soil in the areas where the remains have been found are currently [being] undertaken by the National Veterinary Laboratory," Cyril Taolo, the acting director of Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, told Live Science in an email.

Taolo added, "We are not in a position [to] divulge details of the investigation that is ongoing and we do not wish to speculate on the cause of the mortalities."

Although some conservationists have suggested the government is not taking these deaths seriously, Taolo said otherwise. The die-off is "taken with all the due seriousness that it deserves. That is why resources have been expended to establish the extent of the mortalities and the cause."

Originally published on Live Science.

A post-mortem of a pregnant wild elephant in Kerala, India, that died on May 27, suggests the mother-to-be's death may have resulted from an explosion in her mouth after she ate a fruit stuffed with firecrackers, according to news reports.

"(The explosion) fractured the bones and caused a lot of damage to the mouth. The animal could not eat and became weak. And then died," said Ashique Ali, a local forest officer, CNN reported. 

Locals sometimes ward off, and kill, wild boars with firecracker-stuffed pineapples and other sweet fruits, according to CNN. To date, one person, only identified as Wilson, has been arrested for his alleged role in the killing, state forest minister K Raju said today (June 5), The Indian Express reported.

Related: Elephant images: Largest land animals

Forest officers initially found the injured 15-year-old elephant on May 23, but they were unable to immobilize her so that she could be treated, Ali said, according to CNN. Two days later, she was seen standing in a river. "In order to give treatment, it has to be immobilized but we could not use a tranquilizer while it is in the water because then the animal can drown," Ali said, according to CNN.

The officers tried using two captive elephants to help guide the injured animal from the stream, to no avail. "For almost 48 hours, the elephant stood in that spot, before succumbing to the deep internal injuries on the evening of May 27," the Express reported.

Individuals from the state's forest department are looking for clues in the area, such as more explosive-laced snares, to find out who was involved in the elephant's death, the Express reported.

"Central Government has taken a very serious note of the killing of an elephant in Mallapuram, #Kerala. We will not leave any stone unturned to investigate properly and nab the culprit(s). This is not an Indian culture to feed fire crackers and kill," India's environment minister Prakash Javadekar wrote on Twitter.

India is home to more than half of the world's wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), with 27,312 individuals living in the country, according to the conservation group Elephant Family. The greatest threat to these elephants has been human activity that is destroying their natural habitat, particularly the natural corridors connecting these areas, Elephant Family said.

• Incredible photos capture last glimpse of long-tusked 'elephant queen'
• In photos: The most surprising elephant relatives on Earth
• 15 of the largest animals of their kind on Earth

Archaeologists have discovered the nearly complete skeleton of an enormous, now-extinct elephant that lived about 300,000 years ago in what is now the northern German town of Schöningen, according to new research.

Although this elephant — the Eurasian straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) — likely died of old age, meat-eaters promptly devoured it; bite marks on its bones suggest that carnivores feasted on the dead beast, and flint flakes and bone tools found near the elephant indicate that humans scavenged whatever was left, the researchers said.

"The Stone Age hunters probably cut meat, tendons and fat from the carcass," project researcher Jordi Serangeli, head of the excavation in Schöningen, said in a statement.

Related: Elephant images: Largest land animals

The elephant died on the western side of a vast lake, a hint that it perished from natural causes.

"Elephants often remain near and in water when they are sick or old," Ivo Verheijen, a doctoral student in archaeozoology and paleontology at the University of Tübingen, said in the statement. In addition, the elephant, a female, had worn teeth, suggesting it was old when it died, he said. 

Researchers have found the remains of at least 10 elephants dating to the Lower Paleolithic — also known as the Old Stone Age (about 3 million to 300,000 years ago) —  over the past several years at Schöningen. But this new find is by far the most complete. The remains include 7.5-foot-long (2.3 meters) tusks — which are 125% longer than the average 6-foot-long (1.8 m) tusk of a modern African elephant, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. The researchers also found the complete lower jaw, numerous vertebrae and ribs, large bones from three of its four legs and all five of its delicate hyoid bones, which are found in the neck and help support the tongue and voice box. 

This P. antiquus elephant had a shoulder height of about 10.5 feet (3.2 m) and would have weighed about 7.5 tons (6.8 metric tons). "It was therefore larger than today's African elephant cows," Verheijen said.

Near these remains, researchers found 30 small flint flakes and two long bone tools. Micro flakes embedded in these two bones suggests the ancient humans who scavenged the elephant used them to sharpen stone tools (called knapping) at the site, said project researcher Bárbara Rodríguez Álvarez, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen. 

Of note, the ancient humans who likely scavenged the elephant were not Homo sapiens. The earliest evidence of H. sapiens in Europe dates to about 45,000 years ago, according to excavations at a cave in Bulgaria, a study published last week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution found. Instead, these human scavengers were likely H. heidelbergensis, an extinct human relative who lived about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, the researchers in Germany said.

Wildlife watering hole

The lake was a popular hole for elephants, according to several of their preserved footprints just 330 feet (100 m) from the new elephant excavation site. 

"A small herd of adults and younger animals must have passed through," Flavio Altamura, a researcher at the Department of Antiquities at Sapienza University in Rome, said in the statement. "The heavy animals were walking parallel to the lakeshore. Their feet sank into the mud, leaving behind circular tracks."

Related: Incredible photos capture last glimpse of long-tusked 'elephant queen'

These elephants would have lived in a comfortable climate, comparable to today's; about 300,000 years ago, Europe was in the Reinsdorf interglacial, a warmer period bookended by two glacial (or colder) periods. Other animals thrived there, too. About 20 kinds of large animals lived around the lake, including lions, bears, saber-toothed cats, rhinoceroses, wild horses, deer and large cattle, according to excavations. "The wealth of wildlife was similar to that of modern Africa," Serangeli said.

All of these animals attracted ancient human hunters. Archaeologists have found the remains of 10 wooden spears and one throwing stick from 300,000 years ago, according to a study published online April 20 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. 

The new finding was uncovered in a collaborative effort between the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage. The research will be published in the magazine "Archäologie in Deutschland" (Archaeology in Germany) and was presented at a press conference in Schöningen on May 19.

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Originally published on Live Science.

A photo that circulated widely on Twitter in March allegedly showed a pair of Asian elephants in rural southwestern China that had blissfully "passed out" in a tea garden after raiding a village and drinking too much human-made alcohol. 

But sometimes, internet stories that seem too good to be true really are too good to be true.

Live Science wrote about the elephants, referencing a tweet by Parveen Kaswan, an Indian Forest Service officer, who said that the elephants "somehow found wine" and were sleeping off their boozy revel. But his tweets about the elephants have since been deleted, and further details about the elephants and the accompanying photos indicate that the story, while charming, was false.

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Tweets about the elephants included two images: The photo on the left showed a group of elephants standing in a field, and the photo on the right showed two elephants splayed on their sides, surrounded by tea plants.

The story (and photos) of elephants raiding a remote village in Yunnan province and getting drunk, first surfaced on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform, Chinese news outlet Xinhua News reported on March 16.

A group of 14 elephants did, in fact, enter several villages in Yunnan province's Menghai County on March 11, damaging roofs and overturning wine jars, according to official reports. 

But did the elephants get drunk? 

"It was difficult to confirm" if the elephants drank any of the alcohol that they spilled, said Long Yunhai, deputy director of the Forestry and Grassland Bureau of Menghai County, according to Xinhua News

One more elephant incident took place on March 14; nine elephants entered another village, also in Menghai County, where they damaged several buildings and broke solar energy structures. But the viral photos of the so-called drunken elephants were not taken during any of the recent "raids," Yunhai said. In fact, the photo of the elephants in the field previously appeared online on June 19, 2019, in an article about elephant management in China, according to AP News.

"The photo was credited to the Yunnan Province Elephant Management Bureau, which researches elephants. There’s no mention of the elephants being drunk," AP News reported. 

That image also accompanied an article published online in December 2019 by the news outlet Huanbao World, about the opening of an Asian elephant research center in Kunming, which is also in Yunnan province.  

The photo of the snoozing elephant pair appears to be a still image taken from a drone video; vegetation around the elephants matches that in the photo of the standing group, AP News says. Markings on the "drunk" elephants also match those in the larger group, suggesting that this image was captured at the same time, and does not represent the marauding elephants that were reported in Menghai County in March, according to AP News.

Forestry officials in Yunnan province said that the elephants in the footage were resting, but were not drunk, Xinhua News reported.

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Originally published on Live Science.

UPDATED on May 8 -- Editor’s note: Live Science has found that the elephants discussed in this article were not drunk; they were just resting. Read more about where the story came from and how it went viral.

Tweets mentioned in the article that describe the "drunk" elephants have since been deleted and are no longer available.

Large public gatherings are currently prohibited in many places to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus, but that didn’t stop a group of Asian elephants from partying in a field in Yunnan Province in China, where they found and drained vats of corn wine. 

Two elephants drank so much wine that they passed out in a tea garden.

A photo of the inebriated elephants — lying curled up back to back on a dirt bed amid the greenery — went viral after it was shared on Twitter on March 18 by Parveen Kaswan, a conservationist and an Indian Forest Service officer. Kaswan mentioned in the tweet that wild elephants have a taste for booze, quipping that these particular pachyderms had turned to alcohol "to sanitize [their] trunks," and were sleeping off the aftermath.

Related: Incredible photos capture last glimpse of long-tusked 'elephant queen'

Asian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus) inhabit grasslands and forest habitats across countries in southern Asia, and there are estimated to be fewer than 50,000 of them in the wild, the World Wildlife Fund says. 

But in China there are only 250 of these elephants left, and they face the looming threat of local extinction, Kaswan tweeted.

In another tweet, Kaswan posted a photo of the elephant herd "when they were all sober," clustered together amid rows of crops. In forest regions where the elephants live, locals are aware of the animals' interest in human-made alcohol, Kaswan said. But even when people bury their liquor, "somehow elephants find it," Kaswan wrote in the tweet.

Elephants will even "mark" locations where they have previously found alcohol and come back later to see if there's more, Kaswan added.

Persistent rumors and anecdotes had long suggested that African elephants regularly become drunk on fermented marula fruit, though scientists determined more than a decade ago that this was likely a myth. An animal the size of an elephant — weighing more than 6,600 lbs. (3,000 kilograms) — would have to consume 400 times the amount of fruit in its normal diet and not drink any water for the alcohol to make it intoxicated, researchers reported in 2006 in the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology.

However, elephants that come across caches of liquor or wine might guzzle the beverage for its sweet taste, which could lead to drunkenness, Shermin de Silva, a cofounder of Sri Lanka's Elephant Forest and Environmental Trust, previously told Live Science.

Other types of wild creatures have demonstrated the effects of consuming too much alcohol. In 2011, a moose in Sweden got drunk after eating fermented apples and wound up entangled in a tree, according to the Smithsonian. White-tailed deer often browse on fermented apples in orchards, making them "stumble-y" and "sleepy," Don Moore, associate director of the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., told National Geographic. 

And chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives, appear to enjoy the taste of alcohol, soaking up fermenting palm sap with leaves and then squeezing the booze into their mouths, Live Science previously reported.

But there's one animal that imbibes more than any other — the Malaysian pen-tailed shrew. The shrews' diet consists entirely of fermented nectar that is about 3.8% alcohol, suggesting that the shrews would be perpetually drunk. However, despite the nectar's high alcohol content, the shrews have evolved to metabolize it so efficiently that they don't become inebriated at all, scientists discovered in 2008.

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Originally published on Live Science.