Why elephant has a long trunk?

How awesome it is! Let’s discover the answering for the elephant facts question: Why elephants have a long trunk

The elephant got its trunk, the story goes, because one small elephant child was so curious as to what a hungry crocodile ate for dinner that he got too close to it. The crocodile then bit and pulled its bulgy nose and stretched it out.

From then on, the elephant child was able to stuff large bundles of grass into its mouth with ease.

The truth, of course, is likely to be different to Rudyard Kipling's elephant child story.

And now researchers have sought to understand exactly what that is; and establish why elephants and giraffes have such long trunks and tongues.

The answer lies with the amount of food they need to eat, a new study suggests. It's published in the journal Acta Zoologica.

A team modelled how the tongues and trunks of 18 species of herbivore related to the amount of food they took in while grazing.

The soft body parts – the lips tongues and trunks - are the key to their survival

The elephant's trunk, they found, was vital for it to eat enough food in relation to the size of its mouth. So too was the giraffe's tongue. They also helped the herbivores eat softer, more nutritious plants such as leaves.

The team used a modelling process called allometric scaling, a well-known biological "law" which states that the size of an animal is in proportion to how much it eats.
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