Elephantidae

Elephants are a big family of animals. They are the largest land animals alive today. Elephants eat only plants, not meat. They have a long nose called a trunk. They also have big teeth called tusks.

There are three kinds of elephants alive now. African elephants live in Africa. Asian elephants live in Asia. There was also a third kind long ago. Scientists call them woolly mammoths. Mammoths looked like elephants with lots of hair. They lived a very long time ago.

Many kinds of elephants lived in the past. Most of them are gone now. Some of these old elephants were even bigger than elephants today. They were as heavy as many cars put together. Scientists study old bones to learn about them.

A man named John Edward Gray first wrote about elephants as a family in 1821. That was a very long time ago. Since then, other scientists have studied elephants too. They learn new things about them all the time.