“An elephant trunk has thousands of muscles.”
African elephants are the largest land animals on Earth and use their trunks for smelling, touching, drinking, and gathering food.
By An Nguyen · Published · Updated
Measured against the 176 species profiled on this site. Each figure is converted to one unit system from the published range on the page, so the ranks are computed, not quoted.
| Measure | This species | Rank here | Exceeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body mass | 5.9 t | #4 of 176#3 of 90 Mammalia | 98% |
| Body length | 7.32 m | #5 of 176#4 of 90 Mammalia | 98% |
| Top speed | 40.2 km/h | #44 of 75#29 of 46 Mammalia | 31% |
| Lifespan in the wild | 70 yr | #7 of 169#3 of 85 Mammalia | 94% |
Closest in body mass
Ranks use the upper end of each published adult range, so they compare typical large adults rather than records, and metrics with no published number are left out rather than estimated. The full table is downloadable from the species dataset, and any two species can be put side by side in the comparison tool.
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Core article
A closer look at habitat, diet, behavior, reproduction, and conservation.
The African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) is the largest living land animal. Its trunk, a fusion of the nose and upper lip containing around 40,000 muscles but no bones, can uproot a tree or pluck a single blade of grass and is used for smelling, touching, drinking, feeding, breathing, and calling. Elephants live in female-led families across savannas, grasslands, and open woodland, reshaping the land as they move. For a direct size and anatomy comparison, see African elephant vs. rhinoceros.
A bull can stand 13 feet at the shoulder and weigh up to 13,000 pounds; cows are smaller. The trunk is a muscular hydrostat — no skeleton, just tens of thousands of muscle bundles — tipped with two opposing "fingers" that give it startling precision. Staying cool at this bulk is the real engineering problem. The ears, up to six feet across and laced with blood vessels, act as radiators: flapping them cools the blood before it returns to the body. The skin, over an inch thick and deeply wrinkled, traps mud and moisture in its fissures to slow evaporation and block sun and parasites. Both sexes grow tusks — enlarged incisors that never stop growing and double as tools for digging, prying bark, and fighting.
Once ranging from the Mediterranean coast to the Cape, African elephants are now largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa, with the biggest populations in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Tanzania. They occupy savanna, grassland, and semi-arid scrub — country with sharp wet and dry seasons that keeps the herds moving between forage and water. Elephants don't just live in these places, they build them: by pushing over trees they hold back woodland and keep grassland open for other grazers, and in droughts they dig into dry riverbeds with trunk and tusks, opening water that countless other animals then use. That habitat-shaping role makes them a keystone species.
An adult can eat up to 300 pounds of vegetation a day, and the diet shifts with the seasons — grazing protein-rich grasses in the wet months, then browsing leaves, twigs, and bark once the dry season sets in. Processing that much fibre depends on unusual teeth: elephants grow six sets of huge, ridged molars over a lifetime, and instead of erupting upward, each set pushes forward from the back of the jaw and shoves the worn one out. When the last set finally wears down, an old elephant can no longer feed properly — a natural limit on its life. Digestion is hindgut fermentation and fairly inefficient, so the dung is full of intact seeds and nutrients, making elephants major seed-dispersers and fertilisers of the savanna.
Elephant society is matriarchal and unusually deep. The core unit is a family of related females — sisters, daughters, aunts — and their calves, led by the oldest cow, whose decades of memory for water, routes, and past droughts can decide whether the group survives a hard year. Males leave as they mature, living alone or in loose bachelor groups, and periodically enter musth, a testosterone surge marked by aggression, temporal-gland secretions, and a strong drive to mate; rival musth bulls may clash with dangerous force. Communication runs across touch, scent, sight, and sound — including infrasound, deep rumbles below human hearing that travel through ground and air for miles to coordinate scattered herds.
African elephants have the longest gestation of any land mammal — about 22 months. A newborn weighs 200 to 250 pounds and depends entirely on the herd for protection from lions and hyenas. Allomothering is common: young females help raise the calf, gaining practice while the mother feeds. Calves nurse for up to three years but start sampling plants within months, even eating adults' dung to seed their guts with the microbes needed to digest cellulose. Growth is slow — elephants aren't fully mature until their late twenties or thirties — and they can live 60 to 70 years in the wild.
The IUCN lists the African savanna elephant as Endangered, and the population is still falling. The heaviest blow is the ivory trade: poaching for tusks, driven by overseas black markets, has erased whole family groups, sometimes in a single night. Habitat fragmentation compounds it — as farms, roads, and settlements cut across old migration routes, elephants are squeezed into isolated reserves, which sharpens conflict when they raid crops and are killed in retaliation. The measures that work are sustained anti-poaching enforcement, dismantling ivory-trafficking networks, and linking protected areas across borders so herds regain room to move.
Kingdom
Animalia
Phylum
Chordata
Class
Order
Proboscidea
Family
Elephantidae
Genus
Loxodonta
Species
L. africana
An elephant trunk has thousands of muscles.
Elephants use mud like sunscreen.
Large ears help release body heat.
Families are led by experienced females called matriarchs.
Select a question to reveal the answer.
The trunk helps an elephant smell, touch, drink, and gather food.
They eat plants such as grasses, bark, leaves, and fruit.
African elephants communicate over long distances using low-frequency rumble sounds called infrasound, which can travel through the ground, as well as via trumpets, touches, and gestures.
African elephants are the largest land animals on Earth, with adults weighing several tons and standing taller than most people at the shoulder.
African elephants live in Africa, especially savannas, woodlands, and forest edges where they can find water and large amounts of plants.
Yes. African elephants are listed as Endangered because poaching, habitat loss, and conflict with people have reduced many populations.
Yes. Females and calves usually live in family herds led by an experienced matriarch, while adult males often spend more time alone or in loose groups.
African elephants commonly live 60 to 70 years in the wild. Their teeth wear down over time, and the condition of the final set of molars can limit an older elephant's ability to feed.
Pregnancy lasts about 22 months, the longest gestation of any living land mammal. A female usually gives birth to one calf.
Large, blood-vessel-rich ears help release body heat. Flapping the ears moves air across those vessels and helps cool the elephant in hot conditions.
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