Class+Wikipedia

=Our Class Wikipedia=

During Term One and Two the class have been researching Elephants and looking in to the different ways we could share this information with other people around the world. We decided to help other children learn my making our own wikipedia page about elephants. Once it is completed we plan to edit the real Simple Wikipedia page to add information that they might have missed.

To assess how successful we have been we will then monitor the History section on the Elephant Simple Wikipedia page and see if our changes stay online.

=Our Progress So Far=

Elephant

 * Elephants** are the largest living land mammals The largest elephant known was a male. It weighed 12 tonnes (12,247 Kg). An elephant child is called a //calf//. At birth, a calf can have a weight of 100Kg. The baby elephant develops for 20 to 22 months inside its mother. No other land animal takes this long to develop.

**Physical description** An elephant's most obvious part is the //trunk//. The trunk is a very long noes, made from the upper lip. An elephant uses its trunk to grab things such as food. Elephants also have //tusks//. Tusks are large teeth coming out of their upper jaws. A lot of ivory comes from elephant tusks. Ivory traders killed too many elephants, so now hunting them is illegal.

People knew for a long time there were different kinds of elephants. The scientific word for a kind of animal is //[|species]//. These species are [|African] and [|Asian elephants]. African elephants are larger and have bigger ears. These big ears have many //veins//, which carry blood throughout the body. Scientists think that the blood going through their ears helps African elephants to cool off. The weather is hotter in Africa than in Asia, so it is hard for elephants to stay cool.

Female African elephants have tusks, but female Asian elephants do not. African elephants have a low place in their back. African elephants have two "fingers" at the end of their trunks, but Asian elephants only have one.

Elephants eat a lot of grass. Grass is hard to chew, so their teeth are very important. Elephants have 24 teeth: 12 front teeth, called //[|premolars]//, and 12 back teeth, called //[|molars]//. The teeth come out in order, from front to back. Because grass is very tough, the elephant teeth slowly wear out. When the last molar wears out, the elephant usually dies because it cannot eat.

Some African elephants live on the [|savanna] while others live in the [|forest]. Today, many people think these are different species. Scientists named the forest group //Loxodonta cyclotis// and the savanna group //Loxodonta africanus//. This means that African elephants are even more in danger of dying off forever than people used to think.



Human Uses
People have used elephants to move around and to have fun. Many circuses have them. They fought in armies, they also did heavy work like lifting trees and moving logs.

However, people have never //domesticated// elephants. Domesticated animals are tame and have babies under human control. The male elephant in heat is dangerous and hard to control. Most elephants used by people are female, except those used in war. In a battle, female elephants run from males, so armies needed males.

In the wild, elephants have strong family groups. Their ways of acting toward other elephants are hard for people to understand. They "talk" to each other with very low sounds. Most elephants sounds are so low, people cannot hear them. But elephants can hear these sounds far away.

The [|extinct] animals called [|mammoths] were relatives of today's elephants. Modern elephants live only in warm places, but the wooly mammoth had long hair and lived in cold places.

Family life
A female elephant will have a single baby, usually weighing about 90 kilograms when it is born, every four or five years. An elephant's gestation, lasts about 22 months. Another female elephant often stays with the new mother until its baby is born. The newborn elephant can often stand within a half hour after it is born. Mother elephants touch their babies gently with their trunks. It takes a baby a year or more to control its trunk and learn its many uses.

Baby elephant nurse for the first two years of their lives. After it is born, the first thing that the baby does is wobble in search of its mother's milk. It drinks about 10 liters of milk every day.