World's Largest Collection of Elephant Pictures

The elephant belongs to the order of animals known as Proboscidea, a word derived from the proboscis, or trunk, which is an elephant's most distinctive feature. The trunk is as necessary to the elephant as a hand is to a human being. It is a large extension of the upper lip and nose, which are merged into a single organ. The trunk functions as a kind of fifth limb for bringing food and water to the mouth and for collecting dust or sand to throw over its owner's body. It also plays a part in producing the characteristic sounds which elephants use to express their wants and feelings-perhaps the best known is the blood-curdling scream of rage known as "trumpeting." The nostrils have evolved with the lip and are found on the tip of the trunk. The trunk ends with one or two "fingers" or processes (one for the Asian, two for the African.) The processes, along with a little suction, allow the elephant to pick up objects as small or thin as a penny.

For some 20 million years elephants of many species have populated the earth. Their heyday did not end until the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago. During this long evolutionary process, they also developed massive bodies, columnar legs, and tusks. At one time members of the Proboscidea lived on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. They spread from their African origins across the continents, reaching the inhospitable northern latitudes of Eurasia, and when the Bering land bridge appeared, they moved into America, too. Of the over 300 different elephants and elephant relations that have existed over the centuries, including mastodons and mammoths, all but two are now extinct: the Loxodonta africana, or African elephant, and the Elephas maximus, or Asian (Indian) elephant.

During the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and zoologist, devised a classification scheme for plants and animals and placed the elephant in a division which he called the Bruta, along with sea-cows, sloths, anteaters, and pangolins. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scientists found this classification to be unsatisfactory. The German physiologist and anthropologist Johan Blumenbach replaced it, first putting elephants with walruses and then with rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses. Later pigs were added to the group and the French naturalists Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire renamed it Pachydermata, or "thick skins." This classification was also abandoned, but the elephant, hippopotamus, and rhinoceros have been referred to, informally, as pachyderms ever since.