Mastodon
Mastodons or Mastodonts are extinct elephant-like animals of the genus Mammut and the family Mammutidae. Mastodons became extinct about 11,000 years ago.
| Mastodon Temporal range: early Pliocene – late Pleistocene, 5.3–0.011 mya
| |
|---|---|
| |
| Mounted mastodon skeleton, Museum of the Earth. | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | |
| Phylum: | |
| Class: | |
| Order: | |
| Family: | †Mammutidae Hay, 1922
|
| Genus: | †Mammut Blumenbach, 1799
|
Mastodons, with mammoths, modern elephants and various older families, are members of the order Proboscidea. As adults they stood between 2.5 and 3 meters (8-10 feet) at the shoulder and weighed between 3500 and 5400 kilograms (4-6 tons).
Mastodons were browsers on leaves and branches, as shown by their molar teeth.
Two species
M. americanum was the American mastodon, and M. pacificus was the Pacific mastodon. They are the youngest and best-known species of the genus. Mastodons disappeared from North America as part of a mass extinction of most of the Pleistocene megafauna.[1]
Recent discovery
Stone tools and bones from a butchered mastodon were found at the bottom of a river in Florida. After a four-year investigation, researchers decided that humans lived there and made a meal of a mastodon 14,550 years ago.[2]
Mastodon Media
Mammut americanum molar tooth, Rotunda Museum
Engravings of the femurs of an unspecified extant elephant species (top), M. americanum (middle), and a "Siberian" mammoth (bottom), 1764
The 1806–1808 painting The Exhumation of the Mastodon by Charles Willson Peale
Mammut skeleton previously displayed by Charles Peale at his museum, now on display at Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt
Sketch of the skeleton of Mammut, labeled as "Mastodonte"
M. americanum skeleton, Natural History Museum, London. The skeleton was initially assembled by Albert C. Koch as "Missourium" or "Leviathan", both now synonymous with Mammut.
Sketch of the reconstructed skull of "Pliomastodon vexillarius" (= Mammut vexillarius), 1930
Portrait of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who erected the genus Mammut in 1799
Skeletons of an adult and calf M. americanum, George C. Page Museum
