Land Mammals, features and articles | Educational Science

Jan 14, 2014

In Elephant Society, Matriarchs Lead (Op-Ed)

Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Bekoff's latest book is Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed (New World Library, 2013). This...

Jan 21, 2014

Elephant Mystery at Ancient Syrian Battle Solved

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 11:40 a.m. E.T. on Jan. 24. The mystery of an ancient battle between two warring troops of elephants has been solved, thanks to a modern genetic analysis of the lumbering beasts. Researchers have now found that Eritrean elephants, which live in the northeastern...

Feb 5, 2014

Drones Enter the Battle Against Elephant, Rhino Poachers

To give park rangers in Africa an upper hand in the fight against poachers, conservationists are bringing drones to the places where vulnerable elephants and rhinoceroses roam. Google gave the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) a $5 million Global Impact Award about a year ago to look for new ways to...

Feb 12, 2014

Forest Elephant Numbers Decline More Than 60 Percent in Decade

About 65 percent of forest elephants were killed, mostly for their ivory, across central Africa in the last decade, new research finds. The grim numbers were released at a wildlife trafficking symposium in London this week to update a study published last year in the journal PLOS ONE, which described...

Feb 18, 2014

Asian Elephants Console Each Other When in Distress

Asian elephants reassure other distressed elephants by touching them and talking to them, which suggests they are capable of empathy and reassurance, according to new research. There is 50 years of behavioral observational research out of Africa that elephants are highly social, they have empathy and they can think about...

Mar 11, 2014

All Ears: Elephants Can Identify Human Languages

An elephant never forgets — especially when it hears the sound of an approaching predator. But scientists never understood exactly how finely tuned elephants' hearing is, until researchers tried to see if the pachyderms could distinguish among the sounds made by different groups of humans. It turns out that elephants...

Apr 19, 2014

Animal Sex: How Elephants Do It

Elephants are widely regarded as being among the most intelligent animals on the planet, exhibiting behaviors once thought reserved for humans, including problem solving, tool use and apparent grief over the death of a relative. But are their mating behaviors anything like ours? To start, elephant society and human society...

May 14, 2014

Gallery: California's Deep-Diving Elephant Seals

Extraordinary Divers (Image credit: Michael Tift)Elephant seals are deep-diving marine mammals, with the ability to swim to extreme depths of more than 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) beneath the surface of the sea. These animals also have surprisingly high levels of naturally produced carbon monoxide — a noxious gas that is...

May 14, 2014

Elephant Seals Survive Deep Dives with 'Smokers' Blood'

Elephant seals have surprisingly high levels of naturally produced carbon monoxide — a noxious gas that is deadly at high concentrations — in their blood, a new study finds. In fact, the amount of carbon monoxide found in the blood of these large mammals is roughly the same as that...

Jun 22, 2014

Plan to Build 'CSI Elephant' Uses DNA Forensics to Track Poachers (Op-Ed)

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The shocking news that Satao, the much-loved African Elephant who lvied in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, has been killed and butchered for his tusks highlights once again the...

Jun 27, 2014

Tiny Elephant Shrew Is Smallest of Its Kind

A new, tiny species of elephant shrew, also called a round-eared sengi, has been discovered in the Namib Desert in Africa, scientists say. The newbie, now called Macroscelides micus, is the smallest member of the scientific order Macroscelidea, which now includes 19 known sengis. Like other sengi, the creature sports...

Jul 22, 2014

Elephants Crowned Top Smellers Among Selected Mammals (Infographic)

African elephants bested rats, a former olfactory record-holder, among selected placental mammals. (Image credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist) ...

Jul 22, 2014

Elephants Can Outsniff Rats and Dogs

This story was updated July 23 at 2:01 p.m. EDT. Elephants are known for their impressively long trunks, but perhaps less well known is the large number of genes that code for their sense smell. In a study of 13 mammals, African elephants were found to be superior sniffers, possessing...

Aug 18, 2014

Poachers Killed More than 100,000 Elephants in 3 Years

This story was updated at 10:32 am ET on Aug. 19. The insatiable demand for ivory is causing a dramatic decline in the number of African elephants. Poachers are hunting the animal faster than it can reproduce, with deaths affecting more than half of elephant families in the Samburu National...

Jan 21, 2015

Breeding Season: Incredible Photos of Northern Elephant Seals

At the Piedras Blancas Beach in north-central California, a northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirotris) rookery has become an important sanctuary for this once-endangered species. Check out these incredible photos of northern elephant seals in the wild. These magnificent sea mammals were hunted for their blubber oil to near extinction in...