Elephants

A few weeks ago I learned about the unusual brain of the elephant, a brain which includes an outsize cerebellum, quite possibly in order to deal with the large amount of nervous traffic needed to control the thousands of muscles in the trunk.

Then this morning, by chance turning over the pages of Burton's handsome 'Mammals' (see reference 1), I learned about another aspect of the elephant's brain and also something about its chewing teeth.

The aspect of the brain was its lack of symmetry, with the result that most elephants prefer to use their right tusks for important jobs like digging holes, in much the same way as most of us prefer to use our right hand for important jobs like holding a hammer. The result, in the case of the elephant, is that the right tusk is generally a bit shorter than the left tusk.

The something about the chewing teeth was that the elephant, according to Burton, is born with four sets of six chewing teeth, one set for each side of each jaw, with at least four of each six dormant at birth. These six teeth gradually move forward, through the elephant's life, with the two at the front at any one time doing all the work. The very front one eventually wears and then falls out, with the action moving onto the next two. Eventually the elephant runs out of chewing teeth and starves to death. One might think to deal with this by offering a less fibrous diet, but then, I dare say other parts of the alimentary system might start to complain.

PS: I remember while typing this an allegation - I cannot now think from where - that the chewing teeth of Egyptian pharaohs, that is to say the back teeth, were worn down to the gums by the time that they died. They could not cope with the amount of fibre & grit in the coarse bread which made up a good part of even aristocratic ancient Egyptian diets - and they had no arrangements for replacement at all.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dalhousie.html.