the.com/mastodon
a hairy elephant cousin that ate spruce, dodged spears, and lost anyway.
means An extinct elephant-like mammal with tusks and shaggy hair that roamed the Northern Hemisphere until the end of the last Ice Age.
from From Greek 'mastos' (breast) plus 'odon' (tooth) — literally 'breast-tooth.' The French naturalist Georges Cuvier coined it around the start of the 19th century after noticing the nipple-shaped cusps studding the creature's molars, which made the grinding surface look oddly like a row of little breasts. So a giant Ice Age beast ended up named for the bumps on its teeth.
- name origin
- Greek for nipple-tooth, naming its bumpy molars
- not a mammoth
- distant relative, shorter and stockier with different teeth
- diet
- browsed twigs and leaves, not grassland grazers
- extinction
- vanished around 11,000 years ago in North America
- DNA recovered
- ancient genomes sequenced from fossil teeth and bone
mammuthus primigenius — woolly mammoth, extinct proboscidean with tusks up to 16 feet long, last population died ~4,000 years ago on wrangel island
deinotherium — extinct elephant-like mammal with downward-curving tusks, roamed africa and eurasia until 1 million years ago
gomphotherium — four-tusked mastodon species, lived in north america and eurasia during miocene epoch, 20 million years ago