Elephant trunks are like the human tongue, arm, and nose combined into one incredible organ
What if you could use your nose to snorkel, or uproot a small tree, or smell water from several miles away? Well, elephants wouldn't be that impressed. They do it on the daily, thanks to what's inside their trunk.
If you were to dissect an elephant trunk, it would actually look more like the inside of your tongue than your nose. Trunks, tongues, and even octopus arms are unique organs called muscular hydrostats. That means they're made almost entirely of muscle, and an elephant's trunk has a lot of them, about 40,000, compared to around 650 muscles in the entire human body. Normally, muscles depend on bones and joints to move and exert force.
When we pick up a dumbbell, for example, our bicep pulls on our forearm bones and that causes them to swing up around our elbow joint. But in an elephant trunk, there are no bones to pull and no joints to hinge on. The muscles take on that role instead. This makes trunks incredibly flexible so they can move in all directions. And all those muscles mean they're powerful enough to lift hundreds of pounds, yet delicate enough to pick up a tortilla chip without even cracking it.