Legend has it that when an elephant knows it's getting close to the end of its days, it will return to a specific place to die among the remains of its kin, and over time, these remains will form "elephant graveyards" that tower with tusks and skulls.
The concept is so powerful that it has made its way into popular culture, such as in Disney's "The Lion King," where haunting images of an elephant cemetery seared themselves onto the minds of a generation of children. Such graveyards hint at the tantalizing potential that elephants might understand and anticipate their own mortality. But do these places truly exist, and do elephants know when they are about to die?
According to Leanne Proops, an associate professor of animal behavior and welfare at the University of Portsmouth whose research looks at death-related behaviors in animals, in Africa and elsewhere, there are rare instances when a large number of elephant carcasses are found in a relatively confined area but in these occasional cases, the pile of carcasses has been linked to drought, large-scale poaching, geological forces or toxic algal blooms in water holes, which have been found to poison hundreds of elephants in one go.
What researchers have been unable to show is that these graveyards form because elephants intentionally traveled there to die.