Land Mammals, features and articles | Educational Science

Feb 6, 2015

Extinct Mega-Rodent Had Teeth Like Elephant Tusks

Talk about a rodent of unusual size. The biggest rodent to ever stalk the Earth lived about 3 million years ago in what is now South America — and it used its large front teeth the way today's elephants use their tusks. The bull-size creature likely used its incisors to...

Mar 26, 2015

Woolly Mammoth DNA Inserted into Elephant Cells

The idea of bringing extinct animals back to life continues to reside in the realm of science fiction. But scientists have taken a small step closer to that goal, by inserting the DNA of a woolly mammoth into lab-grown elephant cells. Harvard geneticist George Church and his colleagues used a...

Apr 21, 2015

Elephant Contraception? How a Vaccine is Replacing Sharpshooters (Op-Ed)

Karen Lange is senior content creator at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). She contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. For 15 years, researcher Audrey Delsink has observed the elephants in South Africa’s Greater Private Makalali Game Reserve. As she's watched them, recording...

May 6, 2015

Endangered Elephants Could Find Savior in Chinese Chat Sites (Op-Ed)

Aili Kang is director of the China Program for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), where she has worked for 16 years. In 2008, Kang received the Global Young Conservationist Award from the Society of Conservation Biology. Kang contributed this article, as part of a series from WCS on women in...

Aug 7, 2015

Elephant-Size Underwater Blob Mystifies Divers

This story was updated Aug. 10 at 10:20 a.m. EDT. Divers often swim past bizarre creatures of the deep, but an elephant-size, jellylike blob left a group of them mystified. The transparent sphere floated about 72 feet (22 meters) below sea level off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It sparkled...

Sep 21, 2015

Walk with Elephants: Explore African Sanctuary on Google Street View

You don't have to leave home to hang out with one of the world's most beloved tusked mammals. Thanks to Google, it's now possible to frolic with elephants in your living room (or anywhere else your Internet-connected device happens to be). Save the Elephants, a research and conservation organization operating...

Oct 8, 2015

Elephant Genes Hold Cancer-Fighting Secret

Cancer is less prevalent in elephants than in humans, in part because the giant animals have more copies of a gene that suppresses tumor growth, a new study finds. Understanding how this gene evolved and works in elephants may help researchers develop ways to treat human cancer patients, the researchers...

Dec 17, 2015

Elephant Daughters Step into Murdered Matriarchs' Roles

When older members of an elephant family are killed, younger female elephants assume the roles once held by their mothers, maintaining the networks that keep extended families together, a new study has found. Over a 16-year period, researchers evaluated the changing social dynamics in groups of elephants in western Kenya...

Jan 6, 2016

Do Elephant Families Survive Poaching?

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. As highly social animals – like human beings – elephants rely on their bonds to navigate everyday life. Group living helps elephants with the difficult decisions that they make...

Feb 10, 2016

Elephants 'Sneeze' to Get Hard-to-Reach Treats

Elephants can blow air through their trunks to help them grab food that is hard to reach, according to a recent study. The animals are widely known as some of the most intelligent mammals on Earth, and the new findings strengthen a hypothesis proposed by Charles Darwin: that elephants are...

Apr 30, 2016

Why Can't Elephants Jump?

Elephants have many admirable qualities: They have an excellent sense of smell, rarely get cancer and have complex social lives. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, they can't jump. It's hard to say why that is, largely because scientists haven't specifically studied why elephants can't jump. But it's likely because of the animals'...

May 13, 2016

Elephantiasis: What Causes This Strange Condition?

A Brazilian man with elephantiasis, a rare condition in which people's limbs become discolored and swell to enormous sizes, was recently featured on the popular Animal Planet show River Monsters, which often films in tropical, heavily forested locales. As the name elephantiasis implies, the condition causes a person's limb to...

Jun 1, 2016

Are Elephants Really Afraid of Mice?

From the movie Dumbo to Saturday morning cartoons, the image of an elephant cowering from a miniscule mouse is pretty well established. But the elephant's fear has more to do with the element of surprise than the mouse itself. Theories abound that elephants are afraid of mice because the tiny...

Aug 23, 2016

Condoms Filled with Chili Powder and Firecrackers Teach Elephants to Stay Away

Conservationists are filling condoms with chili powder and firecrackers … to keep elephants away. This scare tactic, part of a multistep alarm system, has been developed to protect farmland and villages from elephants, without harming the animals. Honeyguide Foundation, with support from The Nature Conservancy, has been training villagers to...

Nov 17, 2016

In Photos: The World's Largest Display of Origami Elephants

Origami elephants (Image credit: Julie Larsen Maher)The Bronx Zoo has officially amassed the largest collection of origami elephants in the world -- 78,564 to be precise. The origami elephants were sent in by people from around the world to raise awareness about the issue of elephant poaching. A sea of...