On a sunny day at Zoo Atlanta in 2020, Kelly the African bush elephant reached for a snack and revealed something strange.
High-speed cameras tracking her movements suggested that the skin on top of Kelly’s trunk stretched more than the skin underneath. “But that didn’t make any sense,” says Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
Scientists had assumed that elephant trunk skin largely stretches the same way all over. When Schulz sent data from Kelly and a male elephant, Msholo, to colleagues, they said, “Oh yeah, your data is wrong,” he remembers.
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