Bonciel Griffin-Burress, is a native Chicagoan who grew up on the South and West sides of Chicago. Ivory Dental is the only multi-office orthodontic and dental practice in Chicago owned by an African-American female.

Available offerings span from general preventative care to braces and other orthodontic services. They've clearly adapted to life without tusks but there's a lot we don't know.Ivory Dental Specialists is committed to providing quality affordable dental services on the South Side of Chicago. 'The population is doing well and there's a lot of tuskless elephants. He said dietary analysis suggested that females without tusks eat a greater proportion of grasses. Having no tusks doesn't appear to significantly hinder the female elephants, but this is something researchers want to study further. The exact genetic and developmental mechanism that leads to tusklessness in females and the loss of male elephants during an elephant's 22-month pregnancy was not yet understood, according to the study.Д®lephant numbers have rebounded at Gorongosa to around 800, Long said. However, if the male elephant fetus receives the chromosome with the genetic variant, it dies in the womb because the variant that produces tusklessness females is lethal to males, Long said. If it receives the 'normal' chromosome then it will survive and be born with the necessary genetic information to produce tusks.' 'When a tuskless female conceives a male offspring, that male has a 50/50 shot of receiving the affected X-chromosome from its mother. In tuskless females, one of those chromosomes is 'normal' and the other contains the deleted information,' Long explained. They found that the females with no tusks had a genetic variation in a very specific region of the X-chromosome, which plays a role in tusk development. 'In other words, it happened so quickly because tuskless females had a MUCH higher probability of surviving the war, and thus a MUCH greater potential for passing their genes on to the next generation.'Д«ut what about the male elephants? After taking blood samples of 18 female elephants, with and without tusks, the researchers sequenced their genomes. 'The fact that it occurred so rapidly is rare indeed, and is a direct function of the strength of selection,' he said via email. 'Evolution is simply a change in heritable characteristics within a population over successive generations, and based on the results of our study, the shift toward tusklessness among female elephants at Gorongosa fits this definition perfectly,' said Long, an author of the study. In Gorongosa in the 1970s, 18.5% of female elephants didn't have tusks, while three decades later 51% did. Tusklessness does occur naturally - and only in females - even in the absence of poaching, but usually only in a small minority of elephants. The analysis showed that tuskless females were over five times more likely to survive during the 28-year period than their tusked female counterparts, hence the adaptation was very unlikely to be a chance occurrence. Scientists now have a better understanding of the genetic basis for this tusklessness and why it only appears to affect female elephants, according to a study that published in the journal Science on Thursday. The resulting level of poaching was very intense.'

to kill elephants and sell the ivory to purchase arms and ammunition. 'As a result there were large numbers of soldiers in the area and a lot of associated motivation. 'During the war, Gorongosa was essentially the geographic center of the conflict,' Long said via email. It was a period during which the elephant population plummeted from roughly 2,000 to about 250 individuals, said Ryan Long, an associate professor of wildlife sciences at the University of Idaho. Field data and analysis of old video footage from the park found that the proportion of tuskless female elephants increased more than threefold between 1972 and the year 2000. An elephant's tusks are among its defining features - they help the animal lift heavy branches, topple trees, strip bark, fight, and dig holes for water and minerals.Д«ut an increasing proportion of female elephants in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park have been born without these crucial tools, and scientists say it's an evolutionary response to the brutal killing of elephants for their ivory tusks during the country's 15-year civil war.Д®lephant experts working in the park had begun to notice the phenomenon after the war ended in 1992.

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