Gabon’s Minkebe National Park, once home to Africa’s largest forest elephant population, has lost 11,100 individuals to the illegal ivory trade in recent years, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced this week. (See National Geographic images of the elusive forest elephant.) Surveys suggest that one in every three elephants in what was once a sanctuary [...]
Humans that populated the banks of the river Manzanares (Madrid, Spain) during the Middle Palaeolithic (between 127,000 and 40,000 years ago) fed themselves on pachyderm meat and bone marrow. This is what a Spanish study shows and has found percussion and cut marks on elephant remains in the site of Preresa (Madrid). In prehistoric times, [...]
After a long day of roaming the wild, can you blame a bird for throwing back a few fermented berries? Perhaps not, according to author and neuroscientist David Linden, who says that wild animals will “voluntarily and repeatedly consume psychoactive plants and fungi,” much like humans. In his new book, The Compass of Pleasure: How [...]
For the third night of Elephant Week, ‘the freakish fringe history of the largest land mammal’, Beachcombing wants to share a remarkable series of images relating to Stela B at the Maya site of Copán in what is today Honduras. Professor Elliot Smith’s wrote an extraordinary book in 1924 alleging contact between the Maya and [...]
The NATURE episode UNFORGETTABLE ELEPHANTS features Martyn Colbeck’s stunning film and still photos of African elephants, which he has documented for nearly 20 years. In this poignant scene, he captures a new mother, Grace, tenderly using her trunk and sole tusk to lift her prematurely born calf out of the blistering sun. UNFORGETTABLE ELEPHANTS is [...]
Elephants produce a rumbling alarm call that warns of the threat of approaching bees, scientists have found. The researchers also discovered that the elephants retreated when a recording of the call was played – even when there were no bees nearby. The study was led by Lucy King of the University of Oxford and the [...]
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