Information On Elephants
Excellent Sources For Information On Elephants
Listed below you'll find several excellent sources for information on elephants, some of which go into great detail on specific topics, while others provide more general summaries, mainly directed towards getting one off to a good start in discovering things about this amazing animal.
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org) is a good source for information on elephants. In Wikipedia you'll find an extensive series of articles describing the different species, the evolution of the elephant, and its physical characteristics, including trunk, tusks, and teeth. In addition, there are articles on the elephant's life cycle and behavior, plus discussions on threats to the animal due to hunting, the destruction of their habitat, and what is being done to preserve the species. Wikipedia is a very good place to get started if you want to learn something about elephants.
Another free encyclopedia offering information on elephants is the Science Encyclopedia (science.jrank.org/elephant). Here you'll find a very brief introduction, very suitable for younger readers, followed by links to a dozen different topics about the animal. The topics are short, a few paragraphs each, and consequently do not go into the detail found in Wikipedia. However, this would be an excellent source of information for a report on elephants at a grade school level.
About.com has a number of articles about elephants, viewed from several different perspectives. At homeschooling.about.com there are several short informational articles supplemented by education aids, elephant-related projects, and fun things to do for the home schooler. If you browse dinosuars.about.com, you can learn about mastodons, mammoths, and other early members of the species. Finally, animals.about.com has articles describing the African elephant and the Asian elephant. Most of these articles are submitted by people with a keen interest in the subject, so are generally very factual.
We are often concerned about the welfare of these wonderful animals, knowing that the population of some of the subspecies is small, and that extinction is therefore always a threat. In addition, since over 1,000 elephants are held in captivity in zoos and circuses, we would like to know that they are being treated well, something which has not always been the case. The Utah Education Network (www.uen.org) has a good discussion about the endangered status of both the African and Asian elephant (and plenty of other information on elephants as well). Another resource worth looking at is the World Wildlife Fund's website (www.worldwildlife.org). Through the WWF you can make donations towards preserving the species, and even symbolically adopt an elephant (they don't say if you get to name it).
There are many other website sources providing excellent information on elephants. You can always browse the websites of National Public Radio, the National Geographic Magazine, Science Magazine, The African Wildlife Association, and others, where you can come across articles, published in the past, which are almost always highly informative, as they are backed by extensive research, and usually quite entertaining.