I was out of town when Hansa, the six-year-old elephant at Woodland Park Zoo, died from mysterious circumstances. In fact, I was shocked to learn that the celebrated pachyderm born a few months after I moved to Seattle had expired. I might have missed the story had I not taken a second look at a headline in Seattle Times RSS feed about the burgeoning popularity of pet cemeteries and found that it quickly got into the grim details of how the remains of a dead elephant are handled (yikes!):

It took Bielski, two of his employees and a forklift to handle the cremation of the 600-pound elephant. After the nearly 12 hours of work, Hansa’s remains were mixed with those of household pets also cremated Saturday at Petland Cemetery and buried in a wooded area nearby. Zoo officials declined to keep the elephant’s remains. [times]

Today, after weeks of inconclusive necropathy studies and assembling a team of elephant experts to investigate, Zoo officials announced that a newly-discovered strain of herpes was the cause the young Asian elephant’s death:

” We have received a definitive result indicating the death was caused by an elephant herpesvirus never before identified by science,” said Woodland Park Zoo Deputy Director Bruce Bohmke. “The world’s leading experts conducted scores of assays and subsequently had to create a new test over the past three weeks because previous methodologies were unable to detect the virus.”

Two elephant herpesviruses have been previously documented that cause disease and death in wild and captive elephants. “The virus that infected Hansa is a new discovery in the science community that we detected for the first time on June 28 as part of the research into the cause of Hansa’s death,” explained the world’s leading expert on elephant herpesviruses, Dr. Laura Richman, a research scientist at the National Elephant Herpesvirus Laboratory at Smithsonian National Zoo. . [zoo]

(photo via the zoo’s memorial website for Hansa [#].)