A captive African elephant called Kelly has helped shed light on one of nature's great mysteries: how elephant trunks can grip and carry a diverse range of objects. Jianing Wu at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and his colleagues offered Kelly items of food in four different sizes - powdered bran, cubed bran, cubed swede and cubed celery. "We wanted to know how she would grab food Items of different size." says Wu. They offered the food on a table that measured the downward force of her trunk as she gripped items, and took detailed measurements of the trunk's manoeuvres.
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