Elephants may remember the smell of a relative’s dung for 12 years

African elephants in captivity reacted to the odor of kinfolk they’d not seen for years by flapping their ears and making rumbling sounds

By Carolyn Wilke

The reminiscence of elephants is the stuff of lore, and now it appears they will recall the odor of a relative even after a decade aside.

When Franziska Hörner on the University of Wuppertal in Germany and her colleagues heard about deliberate reunions between two mother-daughter pairs at zoos in Germany, they took benefit of the possibility to check the elephants’ recollections. One pair had been separated for 2 years, whereas the opposite had spent 12 years aside.

Hörner collected …