Living large.

In one word, the elephant is BIG. Elephants are the biggest animals on land. They also have the largest ears, nose, teeth, head, and brain of any animal.

Elephants have to work to keep their enormous figures. They spend much of their day eating and drinking. Elephants consume 300 to 500 pounds of grass, leaves, vegetables, fruit, and bark a day, and drink as much as 50 gallons of water to wash it all down.

Elephants chew their food with four large teeth, called molars. An elephant will wear down and replace its set of teeth six times. When the last set wears down, the elephant, unable to feed itself, will die.

Elephants also have two teeth, called tusks, that extend outside their mouths. These tusks are used both as a weapon and as a tool. An African elephant's tusks can stretch six to eight feet and weigh from ten to one hundred pounds. Elephants' tusks are solid ivory, except for the enamel tip.

The most unique feature of the elephant is its nose, or trunk. The trunk has more than 40,000 muscles and tendons. (People have only about 600 muscles in their entire body.) Elephants use their trunks to pull up trees, dig for water, or call to their friends. They also can suck nearly two gallons of water into their trunks. But the trunk is not like a straw--elephants blow the water into their mouths or onto their bodies to keep cool.

Elephants also flap their ears to cool themselves. An African elephant's ear can weigh as much as 110 pounds and can grow to six feet high and four feet wide. When angry or scared, elephants stretch their ears out in order to appear even bigger to whatever is frightening them.

The only thing about the elephant that is shrinking is its population. At one time there may have been 600 different species of elephants. Today, only two species remain: the African elephant and the Indian, or Asian, elephant. The largest and most common of these huge beasts is the African elephant. Just 600,000 African elephants remain, less than half the number that roamed the bush ten years ago.

Because of their size, they aren't bothered by many animal predators. People are the major cause for the decrease in the number of elephants. People kill the elephants for their ivory tusks and take the elephants' homeland for farming and industry, leaving less and less space for these giant animals to wander.