Jeheskel Shoshani

Jeheskel Shoshani was born in 1943 in Tel Aviv

Shoshani was born in Tel Aviv in 1943 and grew up in the Hatikva neighborhood. He became interested in elephants as a youth after reading a Hebrew copy of the book Burma Boy. He also held United States citizenship.

He served in the IDF in the Paratrooper Nahal. He then worked at the Tel Aviv Zoo and became its head zookeeper in 1966.

After research in Sri Lanka and Kenya, he moved to Detroit in 1968 and taught at Wayne State University, where he earned his PhD in 1986. In 1977 he founded the Elephant Interest Group, later the Elephant Research Foundation, and edited its journal. His work focused on elephant anatomy and taxonomy, and he named several groups of extinct elephant relatives.

He later lived in Eritrea, taught at the University of Asmara and studied elephants near the border with Ethiopia. Because of the fighting there, he moved to Ethiopia in 2007 and taught at the University of Addis Ababa. He was killed in 2008 in an explosion on a minibus in Addis Ababa.