A quick exploration of wiki has taught me rather a lot about the awesomeness that is this week's featured mammal the elephant. Apparently, they are the only other species on the planet other than Homo sapiens and Neanderthals that have a death ritual and will bury their dead in shallow graves and with leaves. Even guarding the bodies for a day or two afterwards. There also seem to be all sorts of documented cases of elephants staying beside dying family members and trying to keep them alive, while babies appear to "weep" over dead mothers.
Another interesting thing is that elephants must learn behavior as they grow up, rather than it all being instinct. It seems that a way of measuring how much a creature will have to learn as it grows up is by measuring brain size at birth to adult brain size. The majority of mammals are born with brains 90% the size they will be as adults. Human babies on the other hand have brains 28% the size of an adults and elephants come in second at 35%, so elephants have the highest amount of learning to do as they grow, after humans. Isn't that crazy!
Hopefully, if I am wrong cousin Diane who works with elephants will correct me here (nicely of course). And you can learn more about elephant cognition here. After the rally I really am going to make good on the long-promised blog, "shit I googled today" but maybe it'll have to be "shit I wikied today" instead!
And finally, I must end with this picture because us Londoners have had lovely warm weather and thus we have celebrated the only way we know how...
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