6 Things I Didn’t Know About Elephants

One would think it would be rather simple to count the toes on an elephant.  For many years the answer has been 5.  But recently John Hutchinson published a paper declaring the answer to be 6. What we learned reading How The Elephant Got Its Sixth Toe:

1. Elephants have a sixth toe which is hidden and tiny
2. Elephants react poorly to anaesthesia
3. Elephant feet are impervious to x-rays and ultrasound at safe intensities
4. John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College in London has “dubious distinction of having perhaps the world’s largest collection of frozen elephant feet… He now has more than 60 stored in various freezers”
5. It took Hutchinson’s team 3 years of study to discover this sixth toe
6. “Gerald Weissengruber at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna says that the paper has “fundamental flaws”. He says that it is unclear if the sixth toe is a sesamoid bone at all, because it has no obvious muscles attached to it as do the panda’s thumb or a human sesamoid.”

Related articles

• Secret of elephant’s mysterious ‘sixth toe’ is revealed 300 years after (dailymail.co.uk)
• Elephant’s sixth ‘toe’ discovered (biosingularity.com)
• Elephants Have a Sixth ‘Toe’ (news.sciencemag.org)
• Unknown Sixth Toe Discovered in Elephants (wired.com)