Our Endangered Elephant bill depicts the mammal known as an Elephant, also known as the largest land animal alive today. Elephants have the longest gestation period of any land animal, at 22 months. At birth it is common for an elephant calf to weigh 265 pounds. Elephants live as long as 70 years, sometimes longer. The largest elephant ever recorded was shot in 1956 in Angola. This male weighed about 26,400 pounds and had a shoulder height of 13.8 feet. An elephant's trunk is an elongated fusion of the nose and upper lip. It is the elephant's most important and versatile appendage. The trunk has between forty thousand and one hundred thousand individual muscles in it. This makes the trunk sensitive enough to pick up a single blade of grass, yet strong enough to rip the branches off a tree. An elephant's tusks are actually its second upper incisors. Its tusks grow continuously; about seven inches a year. Tusks are used by the elephant to dig for water, salt, and roots; to debark trees, to eat the bark; to dig into trees to get at the pulp inside; and to move trees and branches when clearing a path.