Llewellyn Lloyd, Joseph Kamupambe, David Mupupu, Thabo Ramashia, Nathan Gwangwa, Edward Mabotha, and Oscar Severino assisted with handling the animals. Roland Pellet (mechanical workshop, physics department, University of Geneva) and Richard Rohart fabricated the metallic and wooden objects, respectively. We thank the Zoo Zurich (Switzerland) and Antoine Joris from the Réserve Africaine de Sigean (France) for providing the trunks of an Asian and an African elephant, respectively. We thank Ruben Soto and Christine Bruguier at the CMU (Lausanne, Switzerland), Henning Richter, Maya Kummrow and Jean-Michel Hatt at the Tierspital (Zurich, Switzerland), as well as François Lazeyras and Sébastien Courvoisier at the HUG (Geneva, Switzerland) for CT and MRI scans. We thank Athanasia Tzika and Ebrahim Jahanbakhsh for advice, Adrien Debry and Florent Montange for assisting in physical sectioning, and Szabolcs Zakany for the development of the motorized imaging stage. We thank Giovanni Landi, Kimmy Costa and Fabrice Berger for the implementation of the web-based applications, including the trunk animations. We thank Jeffrey Thingvold (Qualisys) for helping with the trunk animation workflow, Gregory Loichot for assembling the webpage with supplemental material, and Fabrice Berger for the drawing of Figure 1 A. We thank Mathias Bankay (Qualisys) and Nicolas Long (Trinoma) for technical assistance with the motion capture set up. We thank Lucia Beccai and Barbara Mazzolai (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Pisa, Italy), Egidio Falotico (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy), Shlomo Magdassi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel), and Sarah Karmel (Photocentric Ltd, Peterborough, UK) for multidisciplinary discussions. This work was supported by a Future and Emerging Technologies grant (FET-Open n.863212 – “PROBOSCIS,” https://www.proboscis.eu, coordinated by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Pisa, Italy, under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The funding bodies played no role in the design of the study, collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, and in writing the manuscript.