How elephants 'hear' with their feet, and how you can do it, too

• Elephants use their feet to sense vibrations in the ground.
• This is one of the ways that they "hear" the things happening around them.

You might think that elephants get all the hearing they need with their big ears. But it turns out the colossal mammals also use their feet.

Sound travels through the air and different surfaces as vibrations, Ross MacPhee, the curator of the Secret World of Elephants at the American Museum of Natural History, told Business Insider.

Turns out, elephants use their feet to sense some of these low-frequency vibrations from as far as 20 miles away.

When these vibrations pass through the ground near an elephant's foot, they travel through the animal's body in a process known as bone conduction, MacPhee explained.

Low-frequency sounds are particularly easy for them to pick up on, MacPhee said. Some low-frequency sounds include the sound of some waves and storms.

What's really interesting isn't that these animals can do this, but it's how they use this sense, MacPhee said.

Elephants "have all of these ways of communicating with one another that you've never imagined," he said.

For example, an elephant might use this sense to take shelter and alert other animals in its herd if they sense the distant rumbling of an earthquake.

Other animals can do it, too

If you've ever held a tuning fork to your skull or felt your body shake at a concert, you were experiencing the same thing that the elephants do, just on a different scale, MacPhee said.

"It's not that it's a unique adaptation," he added. Many other animals, including whales, rhinos, and giraffes have this sensation.

If you want to feel this for yourself, you can do so at the AMNH in New York. There, you can place your hand on a small round disk that simulates what the elephants feel.

The disk shakes very gently and feels almost like the purring of a cat.