The Face of Elephants

I have a set of Salt & Pepper Shakers from Zimbabwe showing the elephant. The image of the elephant on these salt and pepper containers shows the face of the elephant.

Elephants have moderate vision and mainly use their trunk to orient themselves rather than their sight. Baby elephants are nearly blind at birth and rely on their trunks and their mothers to help them.

Elephant’s eyes, which are about an inch and a half in diameter, are amazingly beautiful. They can show different colours. The most common eye colours are dark brown, light brown, honey and grey but there are other tones as well. Some include blue-grey, gold, green and yellow. The right and left eye can even be a different colour.

Elephants have three eyelids. In addition to the upper and lower eyelids, they have a ‘third-eyelid’ that moves vertically across the eye.

Elephants are colourblind. In daylight elephants have two kinds of colour-sensors. They have green and red cones. Elephants can see blues and yellows, but they cannot tell the difference between reds and greens.

Elephant tusks are actually teeth. They are elongated incisors. Both male and female African elephants have tusks while only the male Asian elephants have tusks.

The trunk is the nose of an elephant. An elephant’s trunk contains eight pairs of muscles and can be about six to eight feet long. The African elephant’s trunk has a diameter of about 15 cm at the tip. They have two lips at the end of their trunks. One on the top and one at the bottom. Asian elephants only have one lip at the tip of their trunks.

Elephants use their trunks to help them drink. They suck the water part of the way up and then use their trunk to squirt the water into their mouth.

They have a small mouth with a large mobile tongue. The tongue is essentially a muscle. The elephant uses their trunk to place food into the mouth and then the tongue pulls the food in towards the throat.

Besides their tusks which are modified incisors, elephants have only molar and premolar teeth. The molars grow in from the back of the elephant’s mouth rather than from the top and bottom jaws like human teeth do.

Wow! Amazing what interesting facts one can discover when doing this Daily Content Challenge. I trust you learned something new today too!

# living life abundantly   # published author

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