Wildlife India News | September 16, 2026
An elephant approaches the bones of another elephant, pauses, gently touches them with its trunk and sniffs the remains. Weeks or even months later, elephants may return to the same place.
Such behaviour has fascinated wildlife researchers for decades. Do elephants remember their dead? Are they mourning lost companions? Or are they gathering information through their extraordinary sense of smell?
A recent study from Kenya has added new evidence to this intriguing mystery, although scientists caution that the emotional meaning of these visits remains uncertain.
34 visits to the remains of a single elephant
In a study published in August 2026, researchers placed a camera near the remains of a long-dead African savannah elephant in southern Kenya.
Over three and a half months, the camera recorded 34 separate visits by elephants. The visitors frequently sniffed and touched the bones.
Interestingly, approximately 85% of the recorded visits involved solitary males or bachelor groups.
The observations demonstrated that elephants can remain interested in the remains of their own species long after a carcass has decomposed.
Do elephants recognise their dead relatives?
Elephants are highly social animals with strong family relationships. They recognise familiar individuals and maintain complex bonds within their herds.
However, scientists have not established whether an elephant examining a skull can identify the individual to whom it belonged.
Earlier experiments found that elephants showed greater interest in elephant skulls and tusks than in the remains of other large mammals. Yet they did not demonstrate a clear preference for the skulls of elephants the animals had previously known.
This suggests that elephant remains themselves may hold particular significance, even when the deceased animal was not a close relative.
An extraordinary discovery in North Bengal
Similar behaviour has been documented among Asian elephants in India.
A 2024 study reported five cases in which dead elephant calves were found partially buried in irrigation trenches on tea estates in northern West Bengal.
Researchers found evidence suggesting that the calves had been carried and placed in the trenches by elephants. Their bodies were largely covered with soil, with their legs remaining exposed.
The discovery attracted international attention because deliberate burial is extremely unusual in the animal kingdom.
However, the burial process was not directly witnessed. Other scientists have cautioned that the evidence does not conclusively establish whether the elephants intentionally buried the calves or whether the bodies ended up in the trenches during attempts to move them.
Is it grief, curiosity or something else?
Elephants have been observed standing beside dying companions, touching carcasses, attempting to lift unresponsive individuals and carrying dead calves.
Researchers believe several explanations are possible. Elephants may be responding to disrupted social relationships, investigating unfamiliar smells or experiencing an emotional reaction to death.
Their exceptional sense of smell may also allow them to gather information from remains.
Yet observing an elephant beside a dead companion cannot establish exactly what it is feeling. Scientists have not proved that elephants experience grief in precisely the same way humans do.
The myth of elephant graveyards
Stories of elephants travelling to secret graveyards to die have circulated for generations.
But there is no convincing scientific evidence that elephants deliberately seek out special burial grounds at the end of their lives.
Concentrations of elephant remains can result from drought, disease, poisoning or poaching rather than intentional journeys to a common graveyard.
A mystery that makes elephants even more remarkable
What is increasingly clear is that elephants show a distinctive and sometimes prolonged interest in their dead.
They investigate remains, touch bones and occasionally revisit places where other elephants have died.
Whether these actions represent remembrance, grief, social investigation or a combination of responses remains an open scientific question.
The mystery is not whether elephants respond to death—they clearly do. The mystery is what those encounters mean to them.
Source credit: The Times of India, with additional scientific background from research on elephant death-related behaviour.
The Times of India · September 8, 2026
Original report: Why do elephants visit the same graves?
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