African Elephant Killed by Poachers

Elephant populations are on the brink of extinction due to poachers who kill elephants for their ivory tusks. An international ban on ivory trade, instituted in 1989 by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), has diminished the illicit ivory trade and reduced the killing. Over 120 countries support the ban.

Wolfgang Bayer/Bruce Coleman, Inc.

Elephant Emotions

Researchers are just beginning to understand the complex emotional life of elephants. In addition to mourning their dead, elephants celebrate the birth of a baby elephant, and display excitement when greeting family members.

BBC Worldwide Americas, Inc.

Social Structure of Elephant

Elephants are social animals and associate in small troops for protection from predators. Each elephant family unit is led by the dominant female, or matriarch. When threatened, the members of the troop will surround the calves to protect them from danger, and the matriarch will either confront the danger, or the group will retreat in a tight unit.

Oxford Scientific Films/Hollywood Edge

Elephant Ancestry

The small, tapir-like Moeritherium, the earliest member of the proboscidean line, gave rise to a large and widespread population of which the present-day African and Indian elephants are the only living representatives. Four-tusked Trilophodon lived from the Miocene epoch (26 million years ago) to the Pleistocene epoch (2 million years ago) in Eurasia, Africa, and North America. Also seen in the Miocene epoch were the downward-curving tusks of Deinotherium. Platybelodon, with its lowered, flattened, shovel-shaped tusks probably used for scooping vegetation from the water, occupied Asia and North America in the late Miocene epoch and the Pliocene epoch (7 million years ago). The largest proboscidean, the Imperial Mammoth, Mammithera imperater, was well adapted to the cold in Eurasia, Africa, and North America during the Pleistocene epoch. Its teeth were much like those of the modern elephant.

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Web Links

Discovering Laos:  The land of a Million Elephants

Elephant Man, The (1980)

Introduction to the Proboscidea

The Elephant of the Africa

The Elephant of the Cameroon

Tusk, Tusk: Lifting the ban on ivory

Wuchereria bancrofti: The causative agent of Bancroftian Filariasis