Baby mammoth preserved in frozen soil heads to Chicago

Sucked to her death in a muddy river bed, a baby woolly mammoth spent 40,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost where her body was so perfectly preserved traces of her mother's milk remained in her belly.

Mastodon skull discovered in Chile

A perfectly preserved skull of a mastodon -- a relative of today's elephant -- was found here during excavation work at a water treatment plant, one of the scientists involved in the discovery said Tuesday.

New species of mastodon discovered in California

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 ...

Why you should never arm wrestle a saber-toothed tiger

Saber-toothed cats may be best known for their supersized canines, but they also had exceptionally strong forelimbs for pinning prey before delivering the fatal bite, says a new study in the journal PLoS ONE.

Mastodon Tusk May Be Largest Ever Uncovered In NYS

(PhysOrg.com) -- Research under way at the New York State Museum indicates that a huge mastodon tusk, recently excavated by Museum scientists in Orange County, may be the largest tusk ever found in New York State.

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Mastodon

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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