Tracking toe

A sixth toe has been found in an elephant’s foot

Scientists have identified the mysterious growth in the foot of elephant that had baffled researchers for more than 300 years, as a ‘sixth toe’. They suggest that it helps to support elephants’ colossal weight.

Researcher Professor John Hutchinson, from the UK’s structure and motion laboratory at the Royal Veterinary College, said that the mystery "goes back to 1706".

"It’s a cool mystery that goes back to 1706, when the first elephant was dissected by a Scottish surgeon," the BBC quoted Hutchinson as saying. Many people, he said, thought that the structure was a huge lump of cartilage, and over the years, its purpose or lack of purpose has been debated.

Prof Hutchinson and colleagues used a combination of CT scans, histology, dissection and electron microscopy to solve the puzzle. The researchers said the structure was made of bone, although bone with a highly irregular and unusual arrangement.

But closer examination also revealed that it showed a strong similarity with an unusual bone that is found in the front feet of pandas.

The team claims that elephants can now be added to the list of species for whom five fingers or toes are not quite enough. For elephants, the structure serves a simple purpose of helping the hefty animal to stand up.

Unlike pandas and moles, which only have the false digit in their front feet, elephants have the bone in all four of their feet.

To find out when and why this strange bone appeared, the researchers examined elephant fossils.

"The structure seemed to evolve around 40 million years ago, and it seems to have evolved in concert with elephants getting bigger and more terrestrial and having upright feet, with a more tip-toed foot posture," Prof Hutchinson said. The research has been published in the journal Science. — ANI

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