Lovers of the natural world are going to be majorly disappointed today, because there’s been some seriously bad news from the forefront of zoological science: A group of leading biologists at Stanford has lost their big notebook full of elephant facts.
Absolutely heartbreaking. This is such a huge loss for the scientific community.
A group of veteran researchers in the biology department at Stanford made the sad announcement today that they misplaced the big notebook in which they had written all the facts they learned about elephants, which means that the scientific community no longer knows anything at all about elephants. “Unfortunately, this was the notebook where we had written down all the different species of elephant, the average height and weight of an elephant, what elephants eat, all of it,” explained Susan Choi, a lead researcher on the team. “Over the course of many years, dozens of scientists wrote hundreds of facts about elephants in that notebook’s pages, and now all that priceless information is lost to the world. It’s a tragedy.”
How devastating! It could take scientists decades to recoup all the important discoveries and insights that went missing with this notebook.
The researchers have put up flyers all around the area with a photo of the notebook, which was a purple, Mead brand spiral-bound book with college-ruled paper. They also specified that the notebook has a piece of duct tape on the front with “STANFORD ELEPHANT FACTS” written on it in Sharpie. “We think we left the notebook on the train, so it could be anywhere at this point,” said Choi. “We just hope that for the good of the planet and of scientific advancement, if anyone comes across it they will give it back to us. If we don’t find it, it will take years to relearn all the basic information about elephants we lost. And we’d have to make up a new Latin name for elephants, because we can’t remember what the original one was.”
This is so unfortunate. How will anybody be able to learn about elephants now?
Stanford has already sent several members of the research team to Tanzania to begin collecting new information about elephants—and this time, they plan to copy the facts they learn into two different notebooks to reduce the possibility of another incident like this one. But if you live in Northern California, keep your eye out for that notebook, because it contains essential scientific information about one of the most majestic animals on the planet!
