An elephant’s trunk is a remarkable organ capable of feats of both strength and precision: it can lift logs weighing more than 300kg; it can also remove a peanut from its shell, blow the shell away and transfer the nut to the mouth.
Containing tens of thousands of individual muscles (many more than in the entire human body), the trunk is also equipped with the nasal equivalent of opposable thumbs, in the form of the ‘trunk tip fingers’ (Asian elephants have one, African elephants, two).
So how did the elephant get its trunk?
One theory goes that, by gathering food while the mouth focuses on chewing, it enables the ingestion of the disproportionately large volumes of food required by bigger animals.
Or perhaps it arose alongside the development of tusks, which prevent elephants getting close to their food with their mouth alone.
The elephant’s trunk might even have started out as a snorkel in a semi-aquatic ancestor. This seems more plausible when you consider that elephants’ closest living relatives are the fully-aquatic manatees and dugongs.
All that can really be said for certain is that it’s not the result of a tug of war with a duplicitous crocodile on “the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo.”
Main image: An elephant’s trunk is used for grabbing food. © CarlFourie/Getty