Ever since I was a little kid, my favorite animal has been the elephant. I still have my stuffed elephant I got when I was two years old, and this mug that my mother glazed in a ceramics class when I was three:
I thought I knew a thing or two about elephants, but it was only today that I learned elephants have prehensile penises. As you might imagine, an elephant's penis is large, but it's much larger than you might think (up to five feet long). And it serves many functions! When National Geographic writer Ed Yong was in South Africa, he watched a bull elephant use its penis to "prop himself up, swat flies from his side and scratch himself on his stomach."
Here's a video of an elephant scratching his stomach with his penis.
