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African Elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park instinctively created an "alert circle" during the earthquake. The action was caught on camera, as seen below. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance says elephants circle to protect the young and the entire herd from threats. "Elephants have the ability to feel sound through their feet," The SDZWA said. "This video demonstrates the strong social family structure in elephant herds." The herd consists of Ndlula, Umngani, Khosi, and youngsters Zuli and Mkhaya, who went back to normal after about 4 minutes, though they did stay close to one another, the zoo...

A bid to free five elephants from a Colorado zoo has been rejected after a court ruled elephants are not people. An animal rights group argued Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jambo were effectively imprisoned at the zoo, and had filed to have them moved to an elephant sanctuary. It tried to bring a habeas corpus claim on behalf of the animals - a legal process which allows a person to challenge their detention in court. The Colorado Supreme Court said the matter boiled down to "whether an elephant is a person" and therefore had the same liberty rights as...

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute community is mourning the loss of Kamala, beloved member of its Asian elephant herd and ambassador for her species. After a decade of managing and treating Kamala’s osteoarthritis, animal care staff recently noted her physical condition had irreversibly declined. They elected to humanely euthanize her Nov. 1. Born in the wild, Kamala was estimated to be around 50 years old, which is considered advanced age for this species. The elephant care team fondly remembers Kamala as a smart and inquisitive individual who held a dominant role within the herd. She built strong...

Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou, and Jambo have lived in Colorado Springs for decades in the elephant exhibit at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. Now an animal rights group is trying to release the elephants from what they say is essentially a prison for such highly intelligent and social animals known to roam for miles a day in the wild. Colorado's highest court will hear arguments Thursday on whether the older African female elephants should be legally able to challenge their captivity under a long-held process used by prisoners to dispute their detention. The animal rights group NonHuman Rights Project says the...

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — When it comes to the niche business of moving elephants, Dr. Amir Khalil and his team might be the best. The Egyptian veterinarian’s résumé includes possibly the most famous elephant relocation on the planet. In 2020, Khalil’s team saved Kaavan, an Asian elephant, from years of loneliness at a Pakistan zoo... Kaavan was dubbed the “world’s loneliest elephant” at the time, and the project was a great success. But he was not the only one that needed help.... Charley, an aging four-ton African elephant, had outlived his fellow elephants at a zoo in the...

A study reveals that 400,000 years ago, early humans developed Quina scrapers for hunting, adapting to the disappearance of elephants and forming a cultural link to the resource-rich Mountains of Samaria... These tools were first discovered at a site in France and are named after it. They have been found at the ancient sites of Jaljulia and Qesem Cave. Quina scrapers are distinguished by their scalloped, sharp working edges, which were utilized for butchering fallow deer and processing their hides.The researchers explain that after the elephants disappeared from the region, the ancient hunters were forced to make technological adaptations enabling...

Names are universal throughout human cultures and across different languages. They form a huge part of our identity and help us communicate with each other, but personal names are considered a uniquely human thing. Now, new research has suggested that wild African elephants could address each other with individual specific calls – the equivalent of a name – with fascinating implications for the evolution of language. The new research analyzed calls from wild elephants in two areas of Kenya: the greater Samburu ecosystem to the north, and the Amboseli National Park to the south. The final dataset contained around 470...

Earlier this year, Germany's environment ministry suggested there should be stricter limits on importing trophies from hunting animals. Botswana's President Mokgweetsi Masisi told German media this would only impoverish people in his country. He said elephant numbers had exploded as a result of conservation efforts, and hunting helped keep them in check. Germans should "live together with the animals, in the way you are trying to tell us to", Mr Masisi told German newspaper Bild. Herds were causing damage to property, eating crops and trampling residents, Mr Masisi said. Germany is the EU's largest importer of African elephant trophies, and...

Ancient humans quarried flint to make weapons for hunting and butchering elephants up to 2 million years ago in what's now the Upper Galilee region of Israel, a new study finds.The research answers long-standing questions about why there were so many ancient quarries in the region, and found that they were located near water sources likely used by migrating elephant herds.The study authors propose that Homo erectus — an early ancestor of modern humans that lived from about 1.89 million to 110,000 years ago — quarried flint at the sites to make tools for hunting and butchering elephants until about...

Home to the world’s largest elephant population, Botswana has already gifted 8,000 of the animals to Angola and offered another 500 to Mozambique. For the second time this year, Botswana has threatened to send thousands of elephants to Europe. In March, the southern African nation warned it would fill one of London’s parks with the animals. Now, the president has said his country will send 20,000 elephants to Germany. The warnings have been sparked by a diplomatic row as the UK and Germany mull the idea of stricter limits on the import of hunting trophies amid concerns over poaching. Why...

The Colombian government has announced a raft of measures to control its growing population of invasive hippos—descendants of animals introduced to the country by the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar. Hippos are native to Africa, but in the 1980s, Escobar smuggled four of the animals into Colombia, keeping them at his luxurious country estate, Hacienda Nápoles, in the municipality of Puerto Triunfo—located east of Medellin—which featured a private zoo. As well as the hippos, the zoo housed numerous exotic creatures, including elephants, ostriches, rhinos, giraffes and zebras. Following the death of Escobar, who was killed by Colombian police during a...

An illustration of early humans hunting an elephant using spears. (courtesy Tel Aviv University) When elephants started disappearing from the Middle East some 400,000 years ago, it was a major crisis, and not just for the ancient elephants. Early humans across the region, including in what is now Israel, depended on elephants for their diet. Eventually, humans adapted, learning how to hunt smaller prey such as bison, deer and gazelles, until those, too, disappeared from the landscape or their numbers were too small to hunt. This forced humans to adapt to even smaller prey such as rabbits and birds, and,...

...an international research team led by scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment presents the earliest human footprints known from Germany. The tracks were discovered in the roughly 300,000-year-old Schöningen Paleolithic site complex in Lower Saxony. The footprints, presumably from Homo heidelbergensis, are surrounded by several animal tracks—collectively, they present a picture of the ecosystem at that time.In an open birch and pine forest with an understory of grasses sits a lake, a few kilometers long and several hundred meters wide. On its muddy shores, herds of elephants, rhinoceroses, and even-toed ungulates...

In findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Saint Louis University researchers and colleagues report that elephants play a key role in creating forests that store more atmospheric carbon and maintaining the biodiversity of forests in Africa. If the already critically endangered elephants become extinct, the rainforest of central and west Africa, the second largest rainforest on earth, would lose between six and nine percent of its ability to capture atmospheric carbon, amplifying planetary warming. **SNIP** Within the forest, some trees have light wood (low carbon density trees) while others make heavy wood (high carbon density...

Three elephants have been filmed checking out a hospital as they strolled along corridors in front of shocked onlookers. Clearly there wasn’t much space for the massive animals and one, struggling with a narrow passageway, was forced to go through a set of doors backwards in the Indian hospital. One of the elephants could be seen standing for a while in a corridor of the hospital, and looked as surprised as staff. A person tweeted: “I think this happens when you occupy their habitat and make structures on that. It’s their land and (they) want it back.” Another wrote: “When...

In Ivory Coast a group of conservationists and veterinarians are moving this increasingly endangered forest elephant to an area where the animal is less likely to be targeted by poachers. Scientists have been using DNA testing to track how ivory traffickers are operating. As few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa, according to a new study. They’ve develop a combined genetic and statistical method to determine the origin of poached ivory and they are collaborating with the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime to investigate the origins...

This is the incredible moment two six-ton bull elephants clashed in a 10-minute blockbuster battle just yards away from a walking tour. The mighty animals flattened trees as they stomped around and wrestled with their trunks. Chris Bates was on a tour in Kruger National Park, South Africa, when he filmed the incredible clash on the trail.

A herd of elephants that packed its trunks for an unexpected 500km (300 mile) trek has arrived at a Chinese city where millions of people live. The 15 elephants have been hoovering up crops and poking their noses through doors on the march from the south of Yunnan province to its capital Kunming. A big effort - with tonnes of food - is under way to try and keep them safe. It is unclear why they left their habitat to embark on the journey, which has captivated residents and experts. Some have suggested an inexperienced leader may have led the...

A herd of 15 wild elephants was approaching the city of Kunming, the capital of south-west China's Yunnan province, on Wednesday (June 2), defying attempts to redirect them after a journey of several hundred kilometres from forests to the south. The Asian elephants, which include three calves, originally lived in a nature reserve, according to the official Xinhua news agency, and have trekked for nearly 500km along highways and through fields of crops over the past months. More from AsiaOne Read the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite. They were within a few kilometres of...

It started with a petrified tree, half-buried in the mud of the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The site intrigued Greg Francek, a ranger for East Bay Municipal Utility District, as he was walking the valley last summer. He inspected further, and what he recently discovered led to one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history. Advertisement "I looked around the area further and I found a second tree," Francek said in an EBMUD statement released this week, documenting the discovery. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees I realized...