Jumbo
historic elephant 1860-1885
Jumbo (December 25, 1860 – September 15, 1885), also known as Jumbo the Elephant and Jumbo the Circus Elephant, was a 19th-century male African bush elephant born in Sudan. Jumbo was exported to Jardin des Plantes, a zoo in Paris, and then transferred in 1865 to London Zoo in England. Despite public protest, Jumbo was sold to P. T. Barnum, who took him to the United States for exhibition in March 1882.
The elephant's name spawned the common word "jumbo", meaning large in size. Examples of his lexical impact are phrases like "jumbo jet", "jumbo shrimp", "jumbo eggs", and "jumbotron". Jumbo's shoulder height has been estimated to have been 3.23 metres (10 ft 7 in) at the time of his death, and was claimed to be about 4 m (13 ft 1 in) by Barnum. "Jumbo" has been the mascot of Tufts University for over one hundred years.
History
Jumbo was born around December 25, 1860, in Turco-Egyptian Sudan, and after his mother was killed by poachers, the infant Jumbo was captured by Sudanese elephant poacher Taher Sheriff and German big-game poacher Johann Schmidt. The calf was sold to Lorenzo Casanova, an Italian animal dealer and explorer. Casanova transported the animals that he had bought from Sudan north to Suez, and then across the Mediterranean Sea to Trieste.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jumbo” as historic elephant 1860-1885. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as historic elephant 1860-1885. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q831999. VIAF identifies the subject as 311471366. The Library of Congress control number is no2014138969. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1860, 1885, 1865 and 1882.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jumbo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.