By: Lian Zhu

Two years ago, on a bright day at Zoo Atlanta, an African bush elephant named Kelly reached out for a few peanuts for a snack. This made a strange thing — that people did not notice until then — apparent. For some reason, the top part of her trunk was stretching more than the bottom part of the trunk.

Mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta named Andrew Schulz said, “But that didn’t make any sense.” To prove that he was right, (since scientists have assumed that elephant trunks stretch equally from the left to right) he sent scientists information and data on Kelly and on a male elephant. But the scientists told Schulz, “Oh yeah, your data is wrong,”

After the scientists tried to prove Schulz wrong, they ended up finding the exact weird phenomenon that Schulz had told them. “Talk about a great day as a scientist!” Schulz says. “That’s when we really started to believe that what we were saying was true.”

Later they realized why this is happening. When you see an elephant, notice the trunk’s upper part is really wrinkled just like shar-pei puppy. The lower you go, the less wrinkles you see. This would mean that the top part is longer, thus making it stretch more than the bottom part of the trunk.