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mastodont were prehistorical relatives of today ’s elephant . Like their forward-looking cousins , mastodont had tusk , flappy ear and a retentive olfactory organ . Both animals , as well as the woolly mammoth , are members of the monastic order Proboscidea , a name that come from the Hellenic wordproboskis , which intend nose .
The difference between mastodons and mammoths
Mastodons and woolly mammoths both look like ancient elephants , but they are separate species . One big difference between them is when they appear on Earth . mammoth appeared about 5.1 million years ago in Africa , harmonize to Ross MacPhee , a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York . mastodon , on the other hand , appeared about 27 million to 30 million years ago , chiefly in North and Central America . [ Related : Mammoth or Mastodon : What ’s the Difference ? ]
There are several other dispute . Mastodons were more or less smaller than mammoths . Though they are both herbivore , they rust otherwise . Mastodons had blunt , cone - shaped molars that would crush botany , while mammoths had ridge molar that bring down plants , much like today ’s elephants . Naturalist Georges Cuvier named them " mastodon " because of their white meat - like tooth hump , according toWired .
Appearance
Unlike modern elephants , mastodons had much smaller ear and foreheads and were covered in a thick layer of brown haircloth . hair’s-breadth on their coats , could grow up to 35 in ( 90 centimetre ) and the Male ' tusk grow to about 8 metrical foot ( 2.5 meters ) . Females did not have tusk .
From foot to shoulder , mastodon were between 8 and 10 pes ( 2.5 and 3 m ) tall . They librate between 4 and 6 tons ( 3,500 and 5,400 kilograms ) , according to theIllinois State Museum . That is n’t much different from their forward-looking counterparts . mod elephants weigh 3 to 7 tons ( 2,722 to 6,350 kg ) and range from 5 to 14 feet ( 1.5 to 4.3 m ) magniloquent , accord toThe Defenders of Wildlife .
Habitat
Though mastodont appeared primarily in North and Central America , they finally spread all over the world , in every continent except for Antarctica and Australia . They typically inhabited spruce timberland around valley and swamps , according toCochise College .
Extinction
Mastodons went extinct around 10,000 old age ago . There are many theory as to why . Most of these theories boil down to climate change and/or human hunting , according toSimon Fraser University . Some scientists think that the Earth warmed up from the Ice Age too quickly for the mastodon to adapt or that humans run them to extinction .
Others , like investigator Bruce Rothschild of the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Richard Laub of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York , have a different theory . They found that 52 percent of the 113 mastodont they studied had sign of TB . This led the research worker to think that atuberculosis pandemic contributed to their quenching . Though end by disease sounds like a reduce - and - dry answer , " Extinction is usually not a one - phenomenon event , " Rothschild tell Live Science . It is likely that the disease did n’t kill off the animals directly , but made them washy . twin with the coming out of the Ice Age and push off humans , the coinage just could n’t subsist .
Fossil discoveries
The first mastodon fossils were found in 1705 , fit in to theOregon History Project , when a large tooth and ivory sherd were see in the Hudson River Valley in New York . Not long after , in 1807 , Thomas Jefferson personally financed an expedition that was by led William Clark to dig up mastodon and gigantic fossils from theBig Bone Lick site in Kentucky .
There have been many mastodon fogy discovery in the past few hundred old age . Sometimes , they are found in strange places . For example , on October 16 , 1963 , Marshal Erb was using a dragline to excavate a pond and found fossils that come to be known as thePerry Mastodon . In another instance in 2016,a sinkhole in Florida ’s Aucilla Riverwas declare an " archaeologic gold mine " after an ancient human prick and mastodon finger cymbals are witness inwardly .
Additional resourcefulness
A mastodon with its long, curving tusks.
Sculptures by artist Sergio de la Rosa show three elephant relatives, from left to right: the mastodon, the mammoth and the gomphothere.
