
Michael Lake
Head of Department
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Jumbo, also known as Jumbo the Elephant and Jumbo the Circus Elephant, was a 19th-century male African bush elephant born in Sudan, probably in the late 1850s. Circa 1860, Jumbo was exported to Jardin des Plantes, a zoo in Paris, and then transferred in 1865 to London Zoo in England where he captured the city's and then the whole country's hearts. Despite a huge public protest, Jumbo was subsequently sold to P. T. Barnum, who took him to the United States for exhibition in 1882. Sadly Jumbo was killed in a tragic train accident after a performance at Barnum's circus in Canada 1885. The descriptive word jumbo derived from Jumbo the elephant is a term that later entered the Oxford dictionary used for something of a colossal size.