Elephant Footsteps Reveal Ancient Herd Behavior

When a herd of elephant ancestors walked through mud in the Arabian Desert about 7 million years ago, they unwittingly left their footprints—and clues about their behavior behind. Those prints now expose how the herd behaved: Just like modern elephants, they followed a female leader.

The remarkable 260-meter-long track-way, made by at least 13 proboscideans of different sizes, is at the site of Mleisa 1 in the Al Gharbia region of Abu Dhabi Emirate. Using a kite-mounted camera to take aerial photographs of the footprints,