Close Encounters of the Elephant Kind

Elephants.

I still can’t quite believe I got to see them. Listen to them. Touch their map-like skin, as creased and dry as the land they walk on.

Over a year ago, I visited the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya. My friend Ami Vitale told me I had to go. She was right.

African savanna elephants are the biggest land animals on the planet. Their ancestors, the early Proboscideans, evolved around 60 million years ago, long before anything remotely human was walking the Earth. They spread out around the planet, and diversified into more than 170 species.