The elephant’s trunk is a fusion of the nose and upper lip, it’s around 6ft long and 1ft wide at its thickest point. The trunk houses as many as 60,000 individual muscles and contains no bones and virtually no fat. 60,000 muscles is quite a bit to coordinate, no wonder they’re classed as the smarty pants of the savannah. Humans have around 800 muscles in our entire bodies just to put that into perspective a bit.
It’s uses are well documented but a brief recap of some of them shows you just how good an adaptation it really is. The trunk is used for breathing, smelling, exploring, sound production (of various tones), wrestling, collecting food, lifting objects, water collection, snorkelling… and that’s just the beginning.
The elephant’s sense of smell is supposed to be around four times that of a bloodhound. This enables it to sniff dinner from as far as a mile away or smell a snake in the grass at twenty paces. It actually has one of the best senses of smell in the animal kingdom.
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