Helen FieldsScience Writer

The other day I was at the National Museum of Natural History and thought the elephant was looking particularly fine:

This enormous bull elephant was shot in Angola in 1955 by Hungarian big game hunter Josef J. Fénykövi. Read all about it on the museum’s website. It took 16 months to mount the skin for exhibition. Fun fact: the tusks are fiberglass casts. The real ones are in storage because they’re too heavy for this mount.

If you want a serious taste of a bygone era – you know, an era when someone sees the biggest elephant track ever and thinks, “I should shoot that” – read the account of the hunt Fénykövi wrote for Sports Illustrated.

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