Elephant tusks are both a valuable tool and a potential liability for these gentle giants. The desire for ivory has made elephants popular targets for illegal poaching, and it can have a ...

While similar in composition to tusks, tushes are much smaller, reaching a maximum length of 5 cm (about 2 inches). Essentially, these tushes are the equivalent of a baby elephant’s ‘milk ...

Although elephant tusks appear large today, the tusks of their ancestors were dramatically larger. Due to the large size of the tusks, and the fact that they were longer than the elephant’s head ...

A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. But during episodes of intense ivory poaching, those ...

Right: Kritzolina, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Selling elephant ivory—a hard white material from elephant tusks, for which elephants are often killed—is illegal.

Testing tusks Michael Cherney is the lead author and research affiliate at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology. He said his team started by testing elephant tusks.

And while the part of the tusk that we can see is intimidating in its own right, it’s just a fraction of the entire tusk — most of which is buried deep in the elephant’s mouth.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks. The research was ...