Creating nature preserves, where elephants, gorillas and other endangered animals and plants can live without being killed or disturbed by humans, is probably our best bet for keeping these species alive.

An ancient relative of today’s elephants lived in water, a team led by an Oxford University scientist has found.

Now we live in an age of elephant art. Look at this amazing elephant self-portrait. The art is created by an elephant in this video.

Although there is unquestionably much left to be discovered about life on Earth, charismatic animals like mammals are usually well documented, and it is rare to find a new species today—especially from a group as intriguing as the elephant-shrews, monogamous mammals found only in Africa with a colorful history of misunderstood ancestry.

Elephants are remarkably perceptive when it comes to recognizing specific ethnic groups of people that vary in the degree of danger they are likely to pose, reveals a new study published online on October 18th by Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

At a time when encroaching human development in former wildlife areas has compressed African elephants into ever smaller home ranges and increased levels of human-elephant conflict, a study in the October 9th issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press, suggests that strategically placed beehives might offer a low-tech elephant deterrent and conservation measure.

Asian elephants don’t carry photo identification, so scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and India’s Nature Conservation Foundation are providing the service free of charge by creating a photographic archive of individual elephants, which can help save them as well.

The Asian elephant is believed to be one of the most intelligent animals on Earth. It is also one of the most endangered. But a sanctuary in the southern state of Florida is hoping to save this large animal and ensure its existence for generations to come. For producer Yi Suli, VOA's Elaine Lu has more on the Center for Elephant Conservation.

A new WWF study tracking pygmy elephants by satellite shows that the remaining herds of these endangered elephants, which live only on the island of Borneo, are under threat from forest fragmentation and loss of habitat.

In a new paper in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Michael Hofreiter from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and colleagues from Switzerland and the United States, announce the sequencing of the complete mitochondrial genome of the mastodon (Mammut americanum), a recently extinct relative of the living elephants that diverged about 26 million years ago.