Cool And Absolutely Extraordinary Elephant Facts

Elephants produce several types of sounds. Perhaps the most well known is the trumpet, which is made during excitement, distress or aggression. They can hear one another´s trumpeting up to 6 miles.

The largest elephant on record weighed 26,000 pounds and was 13 feet high.

Elephant females can have babies until they are about 50 years old. They tend to have a new baby every 2 and half to 4 years. They usually have one baby, twins are very rare.

Elephants use mud as a sunscreen, protecting their skin from ultraviolet light. Although tough, their skin is very sensitive. Without the regular mud baths to protect it from burning, insect bites, and moisture loss, their skin suffers serious damage.

Touching is an important form of communication among elephants. Individuals greet each other by stroking or wrapping their trunks. Older elephants also use trunk-slaps, kicks and shoves to discipline younger ones.

Stories of African elephants getting drunk from the fermented marula fruit are not true. The animals don’t eat the fruit off the ground where it ferments, and even if they did, it would take about 1,400 pieces to get one elephant drunk.

Although the elephant trunk is really huge, weighing about 400 pounds, it is so dexterous it can pick up very tiny things including a single grain of rice.

Elephants love water. They like to swim, dive into the water and find great fun in fighting the waves. It also gives their joints a break with the buoyancy they get from the water.

Unlike most mammals, which grow baby teeth and then replace them with a single permanent set of adult teeth, elephants are polyphyodonts that have cycles of tooth rotation throughout their lives.

Like human toddlers, great apes, magpies and dolphins, elephants have passed the mirror test — they recognize themselves in a mirror.

Elephants can detect seismic signals with sensory cells in their feet. They can also “hear” these deep-pitched sounds when ground vibrations travel from the animal’s front feet, up its leg and shoulder bones, and into its middle ear.

Elephants are not scared of mice as some myths suggest. However, they are scared of ants and bees. Consequently, farmers in some African countries protect their fields from elephants by lining the borders with beehives.

The main reason why elephants are massively killed by poachers is their tusks. Although scientific researches proved the ivory consists of dentine, a tissue that is similar to bone and has no special effects or qualities.

Elephants are popularly thought of as having an excellent memory. This could have a factual basis; they possibly have cognitive maps to allow them to remember large-scale spaces over long periods of time.

The trunk of an elephant has more than 40,000 muscles in it.

The average life span for an elephant in the wild is about 50 to 70 years. The oldest elephant ever was Lin Wang, an Asian elephant, who died on February 2003 at the age of 86.

The closest living relatives to elephants are hyraxes, small, thickset, herbivorous mammals often mistaken for rodents.

Elephants can move forwards and backwards, but cannot trot, jump, or gallop. They are so heavy that they basically cannot get all four legs off the ground at the same time.

An Elephant’s skin is so sensitive that they can feel a fly landing on it.

Elephants are capable of human-like emotions such as feeling loss, grieving and even crying. They remember and mourn their loved ones, even many years after their death. When the "Elephant Whisperer" Lawrence Anthony died, a herd of elephants arrived at his house to mourn him.

In the terrestrial world, elephants are giants but compared to whales, they’re more like dwarfs. A blue whale´s tongue alone can weigh as much as a single adult elephant.

Newborn elephants can stand up shortly after the birth. They are born blind, weighing up to 260 pounds.

Elephants are avid eaters. Daily, they can be feeding for up to 16 hours and consume up to 600 pounds of food.