Fénykövi elephant is shot, November 12, 1955
In 1954, big-game hunter Joseph Fénykövi spotted an unbelievably huge elephant track by the muddy shore of a lake in the jungles of Angola. It measured three feet—a foot bigger than the largest elephant trophy recorded to date. Fénykövi returned to Angola the next year and, finding a similar track, discovered the elephant with another large bull. “The smaller was an enormous beast, but my elephant was beyond my imagination. A real monster,” Fénykövi recalled. He presents the preserved elephant to the Smithsonian on March 6, 1959, where a team of taxidermists labor for sixteen months to prepare it for display.