There’s a Sherlock Holmes tale in here somewhere: A clever observer could check wrinkles and whiskers on an elephant trunk to catch a left-trunker pachyderm perp masquerading as a righty, thanks to a new study of trunk skin wrinkles.
Rather like people grabbing a pen with the preferred hand, an individual elephant tends to bend its trunk toward the left or right when curling it to scoop up a fruit or other object of desire. Trunk whiskers on the opposite side of the curl get scuffed against the ground, and so become shorter and sparser. And trunk skin gets a bit wrinklier on the curled-in side over the years
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