Word: tusk
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...advances to the edge of a water hole, its trunk raised high to catch the first scent of danger. Satisfied that the way is clear, it signals and is joined by a second elephant. In ritual greeting the two behemoths entwine their trunks, flap their enormous ears and clack tusk against tusk, sending the cold crack of ivory across the Ngulia Hills. That same sound is heard 10,000 miles away in Hong Kong and Tokyo, where ivory traders stack tusk upon tusk -- more than 800 tons, scrubbed clean of blood and connective tissue and laundered free of illegality...
Repeated attempts to control the ivory trade have failed. The current system, set up under CITES in 1986, requires ivory-producing nations to adopt export quotas intended to safeguard existing elephant populations. In addition, each tusk in international trade must be covered by an export permit and marked with a unique serial number, which is recorded in a computer in Cambridge, England. Theoretically, that number allows nations to trace the tusk as it passes from country to country in trade. But many quotas have been ill-considered or ignored, falsified export documents have been discovered in numerous nations, and corrupt...
...ivory gets from Africa to the Far East. Over the past decade, as much as four-fifths of that ivory has been of illegal origin -- poached, then smuggled. Sometimes the poachers cross borders to hunt, as from Somalia into Kenya or Zambia into Zimbabwe, then carry the tusks back by night. Some poachers are tribal villagers, illiterate and poor, who stalk their prey on foot, walking for weeks, living off game. A poacher in Kenya says he believes tribal charms make him invisible to antipoaching units. He buries his tusks in the village latrine or hides them in a nearby...
...designed to make Parisians forget their revolutionary past and dream of an imperial future. Its real destiny -- like the question of what to remember -- proved quite different. "By 1830, when revolution revisited Paris, the elephant was in an advanced state of decomposition," writes Harvard historian Simon Schama. "One tusk had dropped off, and the other was reduced to a powdery stump. Its body was black from rain and soot and its eyes had sunk, beyond all natural resemblance, into the furrows and pockmarks of its large, eroded head...
...museum in Bodrum, Turkey: 6,000 lbs. of copper ingots (the "biscuits"), a store of tin (which was combined with copper to make the bronze that gives the era its name), scattered pottery, gold objects, amphoras filled with glass beads, and some ivory from an elephant tusk and a hippopotamus tooth. Says Bass: "I can say without hesitation that this is the most exciting and important ancient shipwreck found in the Mediterranean...