African Elephant with Large Tusks (IMAGE)

University of Utah

African Elephant with Large Tusks

Caption

This African elephant has what are believed to be the biggest tusks among elephants at Kenya's Samburu National Reserve. Illegal poaching of some 30,000 elephants a year for their ivory tusks threatens the animals with extinction. University of Utah geochemists developed a new way to fight poaching of elephants, hippos, rhinos and other animals. Carbon-14 from 1950s and 1960s nuclear weapons tests was and still is deposited in animals' tusks or teeth, and those carbon-14 levels reveal the year an animal died, and thus whether the ivory was taken before or after international bans on ivory trading.

Credit

Thure Cerling, University of Utah.

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