How many bones in elephant trunk

A real treat to see on any safari! According to zoologists, their trunks give elephants an incredibly powerful sense of smell — twice as sensitive as a bloodhound. It can smell of food and water from incredibly long distances — up to 19 kilometers by some accounts. There are a number of different ways elephants use their large trunks for heavy tasking. Using their trunks, elephants are able to:.

They use it in a number of delicate ways too, such as wiping its eyes and face, picking leaves and fruits from the branches of a tree up to 7 meters high, and plucking their favorite grasses out of the ground to eat. In fact, an elephant is able to crack a monkey nutshell with its trunk, without breaking the nuts. An elephant rubbing another elephant with its trunk is nothing but an act of compassion, pure love!

Young elephants use their trunks while playing and spray dust or grass at each other to form bonds and have fun with their elephant friends. An adult African elephant can store 12 liters of water in its trunk! They commonly suck up water using their trunk and spray it over their bodies to helps them stay cool in hot environments. The African elephant trunk and Asian elephant trunk are actually designed slightly differently. Asian elephants have more trunk muscles than African elephants, which helps them to do more complex things.

Still not sure of the differences between an African and Asian Elephant? The elephant trunk is a combination of the nose and upper lip of its mouth, technically a proboscis. The elephant trunk acts like both a mouth and a nose. It helps them to do a variety of things like gripping, drinking, smelling, and showing love.

The elephant trunk is a specially adapted body part used for a wide range of purposes. These include breathing, eating, gripping, drinking, smelling, rubbing, and more. An elephant trunk is prehensile and works by the precise movements of the muscles inside it. It is controlled by these muscles, and the proboscis nerve, which helps them move their trunk whichever way they want. It has a little amount of fat but is primarily a muscular organ. There are close to 40, muscles in an elephant trunk!

That means they're made almost entirely of muscle, and an elephant's trunk has a lot of them, about 40,, compared to around muscles in the entire human body. Normally, muscles depend on bones and joints to move and exert force.

When we pick up a dumbbell, for example, our bicep pulls on our forearm bones and that causes them to swing up around our elbow joint. But in an elephant trunk, there are no bones to pull and no joints to hinge on.

The muscles take on that role instead. This makes trunks incredibly flexible so they can move in all directions. And all those muscles mean they're powerful enough to lift hundreds of pounds, yet delicate enough to pick up a tortilla chip without even cracking it.

But while trunks may be structured like a tongue and function like an arm, they are, in fact, a nose, and an exceptional one. An animal's sense of smell is linked to the number of olfactory receptor genes it has.

And elephants, well, they have a lot of them, nearly 2, — more than any other animal we know of. Bloodhounds, for example, only have about while humans have even fewer. In fact, an elephant's nose is so good it can actually sniff out bombs. People have reported that African elephants avoid land mines in Angola and in , researchers put it to the test.

A fusion of the nose and upper lip, the trunk is an elephant's most versatile tool, used for breathing, smelling, touching, grasping, and producing sound. It's probably the most amazing body part in the animal kingdom! Elephant trunks can lift up to pounds! That's right, an elephant can hoist Ulambayaryn Byambajav, a lb world champion sumo wrestler, like he was a bag of peanuts. Elephants are the only animals that can snorkel without aid.

By holding the tips of their trunks above the water's surface, elephants can traverse rivers totally submerged. They simply walk across the riverbed. Elephant Trunks actually have "fingers. That's why the former is able to grasp objects by pinching the opposing tips of the trunk while the latter must wrap its trunk round objects like a boa constrictor.