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

Captive African elephants responded to the scent of relatives they hadn’t seen in years by flapping and rumbling their ears

To carolyn wilke

Elephant memories are traditional, and now seem to be able to recall the scents of relatives 10 years away.

When Franziska Hörner and her colleagues at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, heard about plans to reunite two mother-daughter pairs at a German zoo, they took the opportunity to test elephant memory. One was her two years apart, and the other was her 12 years apart.

Herner has collected…