Animals, they’re just like us: they breathe, they eat, they like rubbing their genitals on things, they look cool in sunglasses, they die. But sometimes before that, they go through a period of adolescence that has a few things in common with what we associate with human adolescence. Aside from the sexual activity and…
Humans are at war. They’re at war with each other, they’re at war with themselves, and some are at war with elephants. Researchers want to know how humans and the long-snooted aggressors can live in peace.
When director and photojournalist Kate Brooks began filming The Last Animals, which premiered last month at the Tribeca Film Festival, there were seven Northern White Rhinos left on the planet. Now there are only three, all living under 24-hour armed protection at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Sudan, the last…
It’s hard to know how smart animals are for the simple reason that they’re not able to come right out and tell us. Scientists have developed various methods over the years to assess animal intelligence, but a simple new body-awareness test involving elephants may be a promising new tool to add to the arsenal.
Late last week, 11 Asian elephants at Cambodia’s Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary ambled into a mud-filled bomb crater that dates back to the Vietnam War. Unable to get out, and with the mud quickly drying, the elephants’ situation become dire—prompting conservation officials to spring into action.
You probably need anywhere from seven to ten hours of sleep a night. But if you’re someone who especially enjoys a full night of shuteye, just be thankful you aren’t an elephant.
The population of forest elephants in Gabon’s Minkébé National Park—one of Central Africa’s largest and most important nature preserves—has declined by a whopping 81.5 percent since 2004 due to poaching. It’s considered a major setback for the preservation of this endangered species, of which less than 100,000 remain…
Earlier today, Kenya set ablaze 105 tons of stockpiled ivory in a measure designed to discourage the poaching of elephants and rhinoceros in the country. The blaze is the biggest of its kind in history.
Two Asian elephants have been spotted making use of a new tool—their own breath. When they can’t get food in their enclosure, they use their trunks as leaf-blowers to bring it closer to them.
In 218 BC, Carthaginian general Hannibal took a group of elephants over the Alps in order to fight the Roman Empire in style. Since then, people have speculated as to the route he took. In 1959, a small group of people with an elephant decided to conduct a test.
We are living through a mass extinction. From climate change to overpopulation to poaching, the world we’ve created is closing in fast on the incredible and still-mysterious animals we share it with.
A baby wild elephant plays between two adults outside of Gauhati, India—the same city where, less than a month ago, a male elephant wandered the streets after being separated from his herd.
Tracking the movement of ivory through the nebulous, international black market is extraordinarily difficult. But we need to start doing a better job of it if we want to stamp out the illegal trade that claims 100 elephant lives every day. One journalist’s solution? Build the world’s most convincing fake tusk, and…
Millions of landmines remain strewn across Angola, remnants of the country’s long civil war. Remarkably, some elephants have learned to sniff out and avoid these hazards, and even alert an entire herd to the danger. Intrigued, the U.S. Army is now testing the ability of elephants to detect chemicals found in landmines…
Animals like tigers, lions, and elephants are majestic creatures we learn about when we’re kids. But unfortunately, many of those species share another trait—they live on the edge of extinction. One hundred African elephants are killed per day for ivory, but one mapping project is tracking these creatures in hopes of…
A small group of elephants who had been displaced have been butting heads with local villagers in a village in Daloa in the Ivorty Coast. The elephants have damaged crops, ruined homes, injured people and so forth. The villagers wanted to kill the elephants. Luckily for everyone though, the International Fund for…
Exhibition director Peter Luckner readies a 13-foot-tall model of a straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) for “Fossil Richness in the Geisel Valley,” on display in the Pfaennerhall Factory in Braunsbedra, central Germany. This type of forest elephant roamed the Geisel Valley some 200,000 years ago.
We tend to think of nature as being both brutal and patriarchal. Animals struggle to survive and mate, and we assume that means that males will dominate. But some non-human species actually have matriarchies, that work out pretty well. Here's what nature can teach us about the secrets of making matriarchy work.
Size matters: Elephants and whales are the only two animals that show up from space when tracked using "commercially available" resolutions. Satellite images have been used to prevent poaching, as well as to keep track of creatures that manage to be as elusive as they are enormous.
Archaeologists working in Israel have made an extraordinary discovery — the earliest instance of Lower Paleolithic-Acheulian stone bifaces and scrapers with the residue of elephant fat still on them. It's considered an archaeological first.
