As a student of the art form, I must point out this press release.

It has everything, elephants, baby elephants, and a lede that mentions both Shakespeare and Aristotle. Not to mention clear and unexaggerated reporting on an interesting topic. Brilliant. Well done, Kathryn Phillips.

Elephant legs are much bendier than Shakespeare thought

Throughout history, elephants have been thought of as ‘different’. Shakespeare, and even Aristotle, described them as walking on inflexible column-like legs. And this myth persists even today. Which made John Hutchinson from The Royal Veterinary College, London, want to find out more about elephants and the way they move. Are they really that different from other, more fleet-footed species? Are their legs as rigid and ‘columnar’ as people had thought? Traveling to Thailand and several UK zoos, Hutchinson and his team investigated how Asian Elephants move their legs as they walk and run and publishes his results in The Journal of Experimental Biology on August 22 2008 at http://jeb.biologists.org

Striking up collaborations with elephant keepers at Colchester and Whipsnade Zoo, Hutchinson explains that the keepers were keen to know more about the animals’ natural limb movements to develop training programmes and prevent the onset of arthritis. Fortunately for Hutchinson, the animals were fantastically cooperative when he turned their exercise enclosure into a film set to record their movements; ‘this is the same 3D capture technology used in Hollywood blockbusters,’ explains Hutchinson. After the team had stuck hemispheres covered in infrared reflecting tape to joints on the elephants’ fore and hind limbs, the animals were happy to walk and run in front of the arc of infrared detecting cameras as Hutchinson and his team filmed their steps at speeds ranging from 0.62 m/s to 4 92m/s. ‘The big problem was keeping the markers in place,’ says Hutchinson, ‘the little ones kept on pulling them off with their trunks.’ Having filmed animals ranging in size from 521 to 3512kg, Hutchinson, Lei Ren and Charlotte Miller travelled to Thailand to film the athletic elite; Thai racing elephants that easily outpaced the UK elephants at 6.8m/s.