A tuskless female elephant in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. Published in the journal Science, the paper’s authors found that many elephants in a park in Mozambique, which were heavily hunted for their ivory during a civil war a few decades ago, have lost their tusks - presumably because tuskless elephants are more likely to survive and pass the trait on to their offspring. Hunters slaughter roughly 20,000 elephants a year to supply the global ivory trade, according to the World Wildlife Fund.īut just as tusks evolved because they provide a number of benefits, a striking new study shows that some populations of African elephants have rapidly evolved to become tusk– less. Poachers kill the massive animals for their tusks, which are worth about $330 a pound wholesale as of 2017. Then Homo sapiens arrived, and elephant tusks became a liability. Elephants use their bleach-white incisors - they’re technically giant teeth, like ours but longer - to dig, collect food, and protect themselves. Sometime in the distant past, well before humans walked the Earth, the ancestors of modern-day elephants evolved their iconic tusks.
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