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An African elephant in Tanzania, with visible tusks. Tusks are elongated, continuously growing front teeth that protrude well beyond the mouth of certain mammal species. They are most commonly canine teeth, as with narwhals, chevrotains, musk deer, water deer, muntjac, pigs, peccaries, hippopotamuses and walruses, or, in the case of elephants, elongated incisors.
An elephant’s trunk serves a lot of important purposes: eating, drinking, and communication are some of the most common uses for trunks. ... Without the need to bypass the length of tusks ...
Taking tusks from an elephant which has died of natural causes. Taking tusks from an elephant which has had to be put down for another reason, for example, severe arthritis, or if its last molar teeth are worn out and can no longer chew its food. Among working elephants which use their tusks to carry logs, there is a best length for their tusks.
When looking at an African elephant and an Asian elephant side-by-side, you can really tell the differences in their head shapes and tasks. African elephants generally have much larger tusks than ...
Men with elephant tusks at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, c. 1900. The poaching of elephants for their ivory, meat and hides has been one of the major threats to their existence. [151] Historically, numerous cultures made ornaments and other works of art from elephant ivory, and its use was comparable to that of gold. [153]
The main threat that elephants face is poaching. Up to 30,000 elephants are killed every year for their tusks. Elephants which are ivory. The ivory is then smuggled to other countries, such as ...
[32] [47] Like human teeth, elephant tusks are resistant to burning. Simple burning typically just chars the outside; it requires extreme conditions over a long period of time to destroy ivory effectively. Using specialized equipment to burn a tusk at 1,800 °F (1,000 °C), its weight decreases by only 0.25 ounces (7 g) each minute (an average ...
A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. Now researchers have pinpointed how years of civil ...