![]() ![]() Paleoecologists Gregory Smith and Larisa DeSantis of Vanderbilt University in Nashville recently teamed up with Jeremy Green, a paleontologist at Kent State University in Ohio. With new detailed dental studies, researchers are getting a closer look at the animals’ diets. That suggests that mastodons gnawed on more branches, twigs and leafy things as opposed to the grasses that mammoths ground between their teeth. Mastodon teeth have cone-shaped tips, unlike the broad, flat teeth of mammoths. To tell a mammoth from a mastodon, start at the teeth. Alizada Studios/Shutterstock Vitalii Hulai/Shutterstock Mammoth teeth (one shown, bottom) were flatter, to better grind grasses. In contrast, “mastodons are stocky.” Mastodon teeth (top) featured sharp cusps that were well-adapted to grinding up woody material such as twigs and leaves. “We often think of mammoths as the supermodels of the Pleistocene, long, slender, very tall animals for their weight,” Widga says. Mastodons were typically smaller and longer-bodied than mammoths, and quite a bit heftier. ![]() Park rangers there have studied vast “trample grounds,” where herds of Columbian mammoths once thundered across the landscape.Ī third extinct relative of elephants is the mastodon, including the American version ( Mammut americanum). It wandered as far south as Central America and left its heavy footprints in places like White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. North America also had the Columbian mammoth ( Mammuthus columbi), which arose about 1 million years ago and was bigger and less hairy than the woolly mammoth. Its shaggy coat and upturned tusks have made it an ice age icon, famous for roaming northern grasslands alongside saber-toothed cats, cave bears and other extinct beasts. The most famous is the woolly mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius), which appeared on the scene relatively late, around 350,000 years ago, and survived long enough to coexist with early humans in North America, Europe and Asia. The last of them died out for the most part at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, which marked the end of the last ice age. ![]() Roughly a dozen species of mammoths and mastodons ranged across the globe at different times in the last 25 million years. ETSU Museum of Natural History Regional diets A cast of a lower leg bone of a modern-day African elephant is dwarfed by the fossilized lower leg of Ernie, the enormous Tennessee mastodon. The answers may even help biologists eke out lessons about how modern elephants might cope as habitats shrink and hunting pressures rise. “How resilient were these populations - or not?” “How did these big herbivores respond to climatic shifts, both before and after humans arrived?” asks Hendrik Poinar, a geneticist and anthropologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Scientists hope to better understand the extinct elephants’ role in ancient ecosystems. A recent analysis of the chemistry of European mammoth bones reveals that those animals probably struggled with dwindling food sources as the climate warmed, which probably hastened the animals’ demise.Įxcavating some of the last known sites where mammoths and humans coexisted points to how early Americans gathered around a kill, making the most of the giant carcass to feed themselves. Tiny scratches on the teeth of mastodons from North America suggest that they ate a surprisingly varied diet of grasses, twigs and other plants, depending on their environment. Scientists are exploring what plants these megaherbivores ate as they rambled across the landscape, and how they competed with other animals - including humans - as climate changed and the last ice age ended some 11,700 years ago.Ĭlues to these mysteries lie in ancient teeth and bones. Now, researchers are knitting together these scattered discoveries into a more coherent picture of the lives and deaths of mammoths and mastodons. These foot bones are from Ernie, a mastodon measuring 3.2 meters at the shoulder, the tallest ever found in North America. Scientists have found the remains of mastodons and their relatives, the mammoths, throughout the Northern Hemisphere - from huge tusks buried in the Alaskan permafrost to mummified baby mammoths in Siberia ( SN Online: 7/14/14). Excavators are working to dig up the rest of Ernie’s bones before this winter, with an eye to reassemble the ancient beast, the researchers reported in October in Albuquerque at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.Įrnie is a jaw-dropping example of the ancient elephants that once roamed Earth. ![]() He would have dwarfed today’s large African elephants, which average up to six tons. Ernie is still the biggest mastodon ever found in North America. ![]()
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