Top 101 Elephant Facts By Anatomy, Diet & Family (Updated 2023)

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Elephants are Earth’s largest, heaviest, and most beautiful animals. Here are 101 elephant facts for kids categorized, namely anatomy facts, family & reproduction facts, diet facts, social life facts, ‘sad-but-true’ facts, and including some unusual fun facts too!

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Elephants: A Book for Children

Bloom, Steve (Author)

Elephant Anatomy Fun Facts

The largest elephant in the world weighed 24,000 pounds!
An elephant heart can weigh 20 kg!
Elephants have bad eyesight.
An ear of a male African elephant weighs over 45 kilograms!
The brain of an adult elephant weighs around 4.5 kilograms.
An elephants trunk is also called a proboscis.
A trunk is a fusion of the upper lip and nose.
Elephants have the largest brain compared to all land mammals.
Other than humans, elephants are the only mammals that have chins.
The trunk of an elephant weighs around 181 kg.
Female elephants stop growing when they are twenty years old.
Male elephants keep on growing all their lives.
A fully-developed adult bull elephant can weigh as much as three minivans, 80 well-built humans, 12 large horses, or 1500 cats!
Calves sometimes suck their trunks just like babies suck their thumbs.
An elephant’s ear flaps contain a lot of blood vessels called capillaries.
An elephant’s dominant tusk is called the master tusk.

Elephant Family / Reproduction Facts

At birth, an elephant weighs 104 kg.
Elephants can give birth to young every 3-4 years.
Unlike humans, female elephants can have babies until age 50.
Baby elephants weigh around 22 kg.
The incubation period of an elephant is 22 months.
Newborns can stand up quickly after they are born.
When elephants are born, they are blind.

Elephant Diet Facts

An elephant can eat 224 kg of food daily.
According to Elephant studies, elephants spend 16 hours a day just eating!
Elephants eat 50 tons of food annually.
Elephants do not like peanuts (the cartoons are wrong).
Elephants love to drink a lot of water.
Adult elephants need up to 160 L of water daily.
An elephant trunk can pick up a single grain of rice!
Elephants love bananas.
Elephants know if a carcass is an elephant carcass.

Elephant Unusual & Fun Facts

Elephants are the only land mammals that cannot jump.
Elephants can swim using their trunk as a snorkel.
Rock hyraxes are the only relative of elephants that are not extinct.
Asian elephants do not run.
A blue whale’s tongue weighs about the same as a female African elephant.
Elephant twins are uncommon.
Elephant Appreciation Day is on September 22.
Elephants sleep 2-3 hours daily.
One of the most expensive brands of coffee is made from elephant dung.
Elephants can travel up to 90 miles per day.
Elephants are keystone species in their environments.
Elephants are endangered species.
In 2000, around 15,000 elephants worked for humans.
A popular elephant movie is Dumbo.
Some elephants work at circuses and perform tricks.
Elephants can give tuberculosis to humans.

Elephant Sad-But-True Facts

Elephants are poached for their ivory tusks (ivory is used to make jewelry and other things).
In Africa, ninety-six elephants die a day.
Thomas Alva Edison electrocuted an elephant in 1903.
Around one hundred elephants are killed daily to get their ivory.
It is illegal to trade ivory today, but people continue to kill elephants.
Mothers sometimes stay with their dead calves for days.
Elephants have been seen touching the dead with their feet lightly.
Sometimes, elephants take the bones of the dead and carry them with them.
They don’t do this with other animals.
Other dead animals are completely ignored by elephants.
Some of the time, they bury the body of the dead.
Elephants sometimes bring food to dying or weak elephants.
If an elephant is injured or sick, elephants in the family unit try to help it.
If an elephant cannot walk, other elephants use their tusks and trunks to move it.
If an elephant can walk but is still sick or injured, the other elephants slow down so it can catch up.
Elephants are also poached for their hide and meat.
Deforestation causes health issues to elephants.

Elephant Special Behavior Facts

Elephants can also communicate with each other by touching.
Elephants can laugh and cry.
To communicate, elephants purr (like cats).
Elephants know they are looking at themselves when they see a mirror.
Elephants have emotions.
Elephants are not scared of mice, unlike myths which say so.
Elephants are scared of bees and ants.
Elephants cannot gallop.
Elephants grieve when someone they know dies.
Elephants can recognize someone they saw years ago.
An elephant in a South Korean Zoo can talk five words in Korean.
It looks like elephants know what other elephants are thinking.
Elephants can hear other elephants trumpet from 8 km away.
African elephants have the best sense of smell out of all animals.
Elephants know if other elephants are male or female.

Elephant Social Life Facts

Family units are led by the oldest female in the group – not the male.
A male elephant is called a bull.
Male elephants are not in family units.
Males leave their families when they are 10-15.
A family unit usually has 3-25 elephants.
Family units become bigger if younger females have calves.
When a family unit becomes too big, some elephants leave to start their family units.
Often, family units stay with 1-5 other family units. This is called a bond group.
If two family unit members die, they sometimes join again to form a single-family unit.
The leader of the group is called the matriarch.
When a lot of bond groups have the same home range, it is called a clan.
The matriarch is usually 40-50 years old.
Matriarchs greatly help the family unit since they usually know the best water holes and feeding areas.
Since matriarchs are leaders, they decide when to travel.
Matriarchs decide when to eat and when to rest.
Matriarchs lead the family unit until they die.
After a matriarch dies, the oldest female becomes the new matriarch.
Sometimes young males go with bulls that leave the family unit.
Sometimes, after a bull leaves a family unit, it stays with another family unit for several years.
Usually, the members of a family unit are mothers, calves, and other females that are related to them.
When family units are walking, calves are in the middle, giving them more protection.