Awesome science facts for kids

Elephant facts: did you know that elephants can hear one another's trumpeting calls up to 5 miles (8 kilometers) away? Keep reading for much more facts.

• Elephants are herbivores and can spend up to 16 hours days collecting leaves, twigs, bamboo, and roots.
• The elephant’s closest living relative is the rock hyrax, a small furry mammal that lives in rocky landscapes across sub-Saharan Africa and along the coast of the Arabian peninsula.
• Between 12,000–15,000 of the world’s elephants are living in captivity.
• Approximately 30% of the entire Asian elephant population is currently in captivity.
• The largest single population of captive elephants is in India — about 3,400 individuals.

• There are about 1,000 captive African elephants worldwide, and most of them are housed outside Africa, approximately 40% in Europe.
• They have the biggest brain of any land animal and their head can weigh as much as a car!
• The food they eat (grass, twigs, leaves) isn’t very nutritious. So they have to eat for 19 hours per day!

• An elephant pregnancy lasts for 22 months (almost 2 years!!!).
• Their tusks grow 7 centimetres a year and can be 3 metres long.
• Elephants are either left or right-tusked and the one they use more is usually smaller because of wear and tear.
• The Asian elephant has four toes on the hind foot and five on the forefoot.
• The African elephant has three toes on the hind foot and five on the forefoot.
• There are around 197 elephants per morning in European circuses (123 Asian and 74 African).

• Bans on wild animals in circuses have been adopted in Bolivia, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Peru, Portugal, Sweden, Singapore, Costa Rica, India, and Israel.
• More than 30 localities in Canada and some counties in the United States have banned shows with wild animals.
• A ban on wild animals in circuses in the U.K. will come into effect in December 2015.
• From 1994 to 2005, at least 31 circus elephants died prematurely.
• Since 1990, more than 60 people have been killed and more than 130 others seriously injured by captive elephants.
• In 1903 a female Asian elephant named Topsy was killed by electrocution. She had been smuggled into the United States while young and went through years of physical and mental abuse as a circus elephant before killing her trainer.
• In 1962, a male Indian elephant named Tusko was injected with 297 mg of LSD by researchers from the University of Oklahoma — more than 1,000 times the dose typical of human recreational use. He died one hour and forty minutes later.