Secret to Long Life...!!

Big creatures usually live a long life largely because they have slow metabolism.Some animals lives extremely long lives and surprisingly enough, their skin is what helps them on their journey to old age! However, there is a contrast. The Elephant and the mole rat have extremely wrinkled starting their young lives.
ELEPHANTS evolved from mammoths over 55 million year ago. Today, they are the heaviest land mammals alive and one of the longest lived with life expectancy of about 70 years.

" Haathi mera saathi", no doubt elephant has been a great friend of man.Beside its loyalty it also symbolize mamathness.Its rough, tough and wrinkled skin attracts us(ok-ok scares too..). Although it's remarkably sensitive. An Elephant can feel small flies on its body. For elephants, even young ones, it's an advantage to be wrinkly and not at all a sign of old age. The patterned cervices hold water which travels along them all over the body. Wrinkly skins can retain 5 to 10 times more water than the smooth ones.So moisture collected during wallowing stops the skin from dehydrating and overheating for a long time afterwards.

Their stretched nose is a masterpiece of evolution and key how the elephant can survive with such  a large body. If they hadn't developed a trunk,elephants couldn't have become so BIG. It enables them, in spite of their huge stocky body, to reach down to the ground to collect food and water. The trunk is in fact a union between the nose and upper lip and it's highly sensitive with over 100,000 muscle units in it. The end of the trunk can move rather like a hand. This mobile tip allows the elephant to feel and pick up delicate objects such as a single blade of grass.

The secret to elephant long life also lies in their extraordinary molar teeth. They have two pairs, two at the  top, two at the bottom. As these teeth wear out,they shed. Acquiring new teeth enables elephants well-fed and healthy into old age. Significantly, African elephants that live in hotter dryer places have more deeply wrinkled skins than Asian elephants.
(fig. shows the African elephant distribution)