- news
- 30-04-2026
On the skin and trunk of elephants
Past and current research from Milinkovitch's lab has been featured in two recent articles highlighting how studies of elephants can illuminate both biology and engineering. In Quanta Magazine, their work on African elephant skin is presented as part of a broader story on how fracturing can help sculpt living tissues. The article revisits the lab’s finding that the characteristic crack network on elephant skin emerges through a mechanical process: as the thick, stiff epidermis bends around microscopic dermal bumps, it breaks, creating a pattern that helps retain water for evaporative cooling.
A second feature, published by the team in by Horizon Magazine, focuses on the EU-funded PROBOSCIS project (lead by the Instituto Italiano di Technologica) and its ambition to translate elephant trunk biomechanics into new soft-robotic systems. The article highlights the Milinkovitch lab’s motion-analysis work, which showed how elephants combine a limited set of local deformations — shortening, elongation and bending — and can even transiently create “pseudo-joints” during fast, complex movements. These insights are helping inspire more versatile robotic grippers.
Original publications
Locally-curved geometry generates bending cracks in the African elephant skin
Martins, Bennett, Clavel, Groenewald, Hensman, Hoby, Joris, Manger & Milinkovitch
Nature Communications 9, 3865 (2018)
Elephants evolved strategies reducing the biomechanical complexity of their trunk
Dagenais, Hensman, Haechler & Milinkovitch
Current biology 31 : 4727–4737 (2021)
Stereotypical force patterns of the elephant trunk in planar reaching movements
Agabiti, Donato, Setti, Dagenais, Milinkovitch, Laschi, Sabatini, Mazzolai & Falotico
iScience 29, 4 (2026)