By: Roman Chen

One day, Kelly the African bush elephant reached for a snack. High speed cameras were able to capture this on camera, and revealed something strange. The top side of her trunk was stretchier than the bottom.

“But that didn’t make any sense,” says Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. He sent some data to his colleagues for another viewpoint of this. They all thought his data was wrong.

But studies in the lab proved otherwise. They involved pulling on pieces of elephant skin. The skin on the top of the trunk was different from the skin on the bottom.

Scientists observed that the trunk extends like a telescope. The tip goes first, followed by the back portion of the trunk. The top side of the trunk also creases more than the under side, which further proves the point. The team shared its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 2nd.

The skin on elephant’s trunks has been largely overlooked, but with just a little bit of examination, we discovered something new. Who knows? Maybe one day, we can put that information to good use.