Elephant trunks are characterized by great strength, flexibility and agility. Now scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences seem to have figured out how the largest animals on land managed to develop such outstanding organs.
It is noted that elephant trunks are a miracle of evolutionary biology – they can reach two meters in length, they have about 40 thousand individual muscles and nerve fibers, and they can lift objects weighing up to 270 kilograms, but they are able to gently lift a nut. For a long time, the natural and biological factors that helped the evolution of trunks have puzzled the scientific community, but now the veil of mystery has been lifted.
During their research, scientists compared three major families of elephant-like mammals, namely Amebelodontidae, Choerolophodontidae and Gomphotheriidae, which lived in northern China from 11 to 20 million years ago and are the ancestors of modern elephants. Scientists analyzed the enamel of the teeth of these animals to get an idea of where they lived and what they ate.
