When you think of elephants, you think big, right? Well, not all elephants were jumbo.

The smallest known elephant species lived in Sicily, and was just over 3 feet tall. It's been extinct for thousands of years, but the question is, how did it shrink?

What You Need To Know

  • "The Secret World of Elephants" is a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. It opens to the public on Nov. 13
  • The exhibition explores 60 million years of elephant evolution
  • It showcases a full-sized model of one of the most well-known extinct elephant relatives, a wooly mammoth

"Amazingly, some animals over a periods of time can get smaller. They adapt to local conditions because it favors them to be smaller where they have more food resources," said Lauri Halderman, the senior vice president for exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History.

The Upper West Side museum is opening a the new exhibition called "The Secret World of Elephants" to the public on Nov. 13.

"There are videos. There are interactives, but there are also 3D models, which I think people will find exciting," said Sean Decatur, the museum's president.

Visitors can learn about all the sounds elephants make and how they communicate. The exhibit will look back on the 60 million years of evolution for the largest living land mammals on earth.

Areas will focus on how climate change, loss of habitat and poaching have impacted a creature that once lived on almost every continent.

"We might have had 17 species 50,000 years ago. Now we have three. One of them is critically endangered. What does that look like?" said Ross MacPhee, the curator of the exhibition.

MacPhee noted the exhibition looks at what should be done in order to ensure elephants manage to survive despite the fact that people are everywhere.

Visitors will also learn about efforts to to protect elephants, like a sanctuary in northern Kenya which takes in orphaned and abandoned elephant calves. They are raised until they are old enough to be released into the wild.

At the museum, there is a lot to learn, and experts say they still do not know everything about how the intelligent creatures think and feel.

"These things are very difficult to scientifically quantify, because these are very rare behaviors that are not very easy to observe in the field," said Raman Sukumar, a professor who consulted on the exhibition.