The list of feats Andrew Schulz has witnessed an elephant perform with its trunk is as long as, well, an elephant’s trunk. These powerful proboscises are strong enough to push over 900 pound trees and gentle enough to pick up a tortilla chip without breaking it. They can snuffle along the ground to sense vibrations from far-off herd movements. They can be used to solve puzzles, peel bananas, craft tools, console a fellow pachyderm or a human friend.

Now Schulz has found the secret to the trunks’ extraordinary dexterity: whiskers.

The hundreds of fine hairs that cover an elephant’s trunk are some of the most sophisticated and sensitive whiskers in the animal kingdom, according to new research in the journal Science. Using microscope images, advanced computer models and a 3D-printed “whisker wand,” Schulz and his colleagues show how the structure of elephant whiskers makes their trunks uniquely capable of detecting motion, handling objects and performing complex tasks.

These organs are an example of what scientists call “material intelligence,” said Schulz, a mechanical engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany who studies how animals move. Though the whiskers are inert structures — incapable of moving independently or thinking for themselves — their physical characteristics allow them to translate signals from the environment into information that can be conveyed to the brain.

The findings published Thursday offer the deepest-ever analysis of a rarely studied organ, according to co-author Lena Kaufmann, a neurobiologist at Humboldt University in Berlin. Scientists have published thousands of papers on rat and mouse whiskers, but elephants have largely been overlooked.

All whiskers are made of keratin, the same protein found in hair, as well as claws, hooves, horns and fingernails. But unlike ordinary hair, whiskers are connected to cells called mechanoreceptors that can detect when the whisker touches an object or vibrates in a breeze.

The whiskers that adorn Asian elephant trunks cannot move on their own, and they don’t regenerate when some are lost. But their complex structure more than compensates, Schulz said. They are shaped like blades of grass, enabling them to bend easily, and riddled with tiny pores that allow them to absorb force and avoid breakage.

Most surprising, Schulz said, is the “stiffness gradient” the team uncovered. Asian elephant whiskers are rigid at their base and soft at their tips. This allows them to vibrate at a wider range of frequencies — probably increasing the sensitivity and precision of the signals sent to the mechanoreceptors at their roots.

“They’re like aliens,” Schulz said. “If you try to compare them to any other whisker structure, they’re basically different in every single way.”