Elephant shrews, or
jumping shrews, are small
insectivorous mammals native to
Africa, belonging to the family
Macroscelididae, in the
order Macroscelidea, whose traditional common English name comes from a fancied resemblance between their long noses and the trunk of an
elephant, and an assumed relationship with the
shrews (family Soricidae) in the order
Insectivora. Nonetheless, elephant shrews are not classified with the superficially similar true shrews, but are ironically more closely related to elephants and their kin within the newly recognized
Afrotheria; the biologist
Jonathan Kingdon has proposed they instead be called
sengis, a term derived from the
Bantu languages of Africa.