New research suggests that American mastodons were avid travelers, migrating vast distances across North America in response to dramatic climate change during the ice ages of the Pleistocene. The study, conducted by an international ...
Archaeology
Sep 1, 2020
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622
Existing age estimates of American mastodon fossils indicate that these extinct relatives of elephants lived in the Arctic and Subarctic when the area was covered by ice caps—a chronology that is at odds with what scientists ...
Archaeology
Dec 1, 2014
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2
For the first time, a dramatic global climate shift has been linked to the impact in Quebec of an asteroid or comet, Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues report in a new study. The cataclysmic event wiped out many of ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 2, 2013
28
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Roughly 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, North America's vast assemblage of large animals -- including such iconic creatures as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, ground sloths and giant ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 19, 2009
1
0
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has discovered a new species of mastodon. In their paper uploaded to the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ, the group describes discovering the new species ...
"Oh my God," Richard Cerutti said to himself. He bent down to pick up a sharp, splintered bone fragment. Its thickness and weight told him that it belonged to an animal, a very big animal. His mind started to race.
Archaeology
Dec 26, 2017
14
427
The most complete ice age mastodon skeleton found in Michigan since the 1940s was recovered this month from the state's Thumb region by a University of Michigan-led team that included Tuscola County teachers who volunteered ...
Archaeology
Oct 18, 2016
0
106
Their scruffy beards weren't ironic, but there are reasons mammoths and mastodons could have been the hipsters of the Ice Age.
Archaeology
Jul 21, 2014
0
0
Under the rich Venezuelan soil, paleontologists have found treasures rivaling the bountiful oil: a giant armadillo the size of a Volkswagen, a crocodile bigger than a bus and a saber-toothed tiger.
Archaeology
Sep 5, 2013
10
0
About 12,800 years ago when the Earth was warming and emerging from the last ice age, a dramatic and anomalous event occurred that abruptly reversed climatic conditions back to near-glacial state. According to James Kennett, ...
Earth Sciences
May 21, 2013
56
6
Mastodons (Greek: μαστός "breast" and ὀδούς, "tooth") were large tusked mammal species of the extinct genus Mammut which inhabited Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and Central America from the Oligocene through Pleistocene, 33.9 mya to 11,000 years ago. The American mastodon is the most recent and best known species of the group. Confusingly, several genera of proboscids from the gomphothere family have similar-sounding names (e.g., Stegomastodon) but are actually more closely related to elephants than to mastodons.
The genus gives its name to the family Mammutidae, assigned to the order Proboscidea. They superficially resemble members of the proboscidean family Elephantidae, including mammoths; however, mastodons were browsers while mammoths were grazers.
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