There’s a Sherlock Holmes tale in here somewhere: A clever observer could check wrinkles and whiskers on an elephant trunk to catch a left-trunker pachyderm perp masquerading as a righty ...

Why is the elephant trunk so wrinkly? It sounds like the start of one of Aesop’s fables. But in a new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers offer up some answers.

The thick, immobile whiskers on an elephant’s trunk may help it to feel and balance objects even though they cannot twitch in the way that many other mammals’ whiskers do, a study suggests.

The learning process for an elephant using its trunk looks very similar to a baby learning to use its hands. Baby elephants touch anything from other herd members to their surroundings with trunks.

Now, researchers have studied the elephant facial motor nucleus—the part of the brain responsible for controlling muscles in the face, including the trunk—in detail for the first time ...

What suddenly made long jaws such a liability? Well it looks like we can thank a changing climate for the evolution of the elephant’s trunk. Eons is available to stream on pbs.org and the free ...