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The trunk's extreme flexibility allows it to forage and wrestle other elephants with it. It is powerful enough to lift up to 350 kg (770 lb), but it also has the precision to crack a peanut shell without breaking the seed. With its trunk, an elephant can reach items up to 7 m (23 ft) high and dig for water in the mud or sand below.
Closeup of the trunk of an Asian elephant. Muscles provide the force to move a muscular hydrostat. Since muscles are only able to produce force by contracting and becoming shorter, different groups of muscles have to work against each other, with one group relaxing and lengthening as the other group provides the force by contracting.
An elephant trunk contains around 150,000 separate muscle fibers in it. There are no bones in an elephant’s trunk. An elephant can lift 4.5 % of its weight with its trunk.
The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), also known as the Asiatic elephant, is a species of elephant distributed throughout the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, from India in the west to Borneo in the east, and Nepal in the north to Sumatra in the south. Three subspecies are recognised—E. m. maximus, E. m. indicus and E. m. sumatranus.
Flapping them creates air currents and exposes the ears' inner sides where large blood vessels increase heat loss during hot weather. The trunk is a prehensile elongation of its upper lip and nose. This highly sensitive organ is innervated primarily by the trigeminal nerve, and is thought to be manipulated by about 40,000–60,000 muscles ...
The trunk is also used for greeting other elephants and communication of emotions such as excitement, competition, dominance, discipline, reassurance etc. [10] An elephant has a large brain which weighs between 4–6 kg (8.8–13.2 lb). It is a highly intelligent animal with a great capacity to learn new things.
Proboscidea (/ ˌ p r oʊ b ə ˈ s ɪ d i ə /; from Latin proboscis, from Ancient Greek προβοσκίς (proboskís) 'elephant's trunk') is a taxonomic order of afrotherian mammals containing one living family (Elephantidae) and several extinct families.
The dwarf elephant P. tiliensis from the Greek island of Tilos is suggested by some authors to have survived as recently as 3,500 years Before Present (around 1500 BC) based on preliminary radiocarbon dating done in the 1970s, which would make it the youngest surviving elephant in Europe, but this has not been thoroughly investigated. [14]