why was the elephant not sorry about it?? story of- how elephant got its trunk
Answers
Explanation:
In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side..." Rudyard Kipling
The elephant got its trunk, the story goes, because one small elephant child was so curious as to what a hungry crocodile ate for dinner that he got too close to it. The crocodile then bit and pulled its bulgy nose and stretched it out.
From then on, the elephant child was able to stuff large bundles of grass into its mouth with ease.
The truth, of course, is likely to be different to Rudyard Kipling's elephant child story.
And now researchers have sought to understand exactly what that is; and establish why elephants and giraffes have such long trunks and tongue
The elephant's trunk, they found, was vital for it to eat enough food in relation to the size of its mouth. So too was the giraffe's tongue. They also helped the herbivores eat softer, more nutritious plants such as leaves.
The team used a modelling process called allometric scaling, a well-known biological "law" which states that the size of an animal is in
We observed that they ate much more than you would predict on the basis of their mouth volume and skull dimensions," explains one of the study's co-authors, Fred de Boer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
"Basically the soft body parts - the lips tongues and trunks - are the key to their survival, otherwise they could not take in sufficient food," adds de Boer.
How much they can bite in one go (bite volume) is therefore a direct result of these elongated soft mouth parts. Smaller herbivores such as an antelope do not need a large tongue to eat enough food.
Not only are these structures key to the survival of today's elephants and giraffes, the team further proposes that they evolved as a direct adaptation to the quality of edible plants in their environment.
It may also explain why some larger herbivores went extinct, says de Boer. During times of sudden climate change, when food became scarcer or less nutritious, other species may have lacked suitable tongues or trunks to eat enough food to survive.