Where mastodons were most numerous, vegetation consisted mainly of coniferous forest with bogs, ponds and marshes. Although we obviously don't know about mastodon behavior, we can make educated guesses about their behavior, based on similarities between elephant and mastodon anatomy, stature, growth, and sexual dimorphism. Studies which have revealed a long growth period to reach maturity in these animals suggest that mastodons would have required the extensive parental care that is provided in modern elephant herds.Įlephants are very social animals. The same may be true to some extent for mastodons. Male mastodons also took longer to become sexually mature than females.īecause mammoths are more closely related to elephants, we assume that mammoth behavior and lifestyle might have been similar to that of present-day elephants.
The male's larger size and larger tusks helped them compete more aggressively for females. Scientists believe that sexual dimorphism, as seen in these animals, occurred as a result of male competition for females. What were those large tusks used for? Scientists believe that the tusks helped in feeding, such as when the animals stripped tree bark off trees, as well as in achieving dominance over other animals during competition for food. Most of the plants they ate were ones that grew near swamps and wet areas in woodlands. Unlike mammoths, whose ridged molars were used for grazing on grasses, mastodons' teeth were used for clipping and crushing twigs, leaves and other parts of shrubs and trees. Then preservation as fossil trackways might occur if there was rapid infilling of sediment over the prints.īoth mastodon and mammoth bones were also collected from these same river deposits near Oceanside How can footprints last for millions of years? The substrate may have been muddy and wet when the animal walked over it, becoming dry later as the sun dries it out.
Trace fossils such as trackways are the closest thing we have to a record of how extinct animals moved.
#MOLAR DE MASTODONTE SKIN#
Trace fossils, as opposed to actual fossils of mineralized bone or shell, include such things as impressions made by skin or armor, footprints, burrows, and nests with eggs. With such a massive body, these animals left deep prints in the mud.įootprint trackways like this are an example of a trace fossil.
One of the first exciting things to be uncovered were the tracks left in mud by either mastodons or mammoths as they made their ponderous way along the edge of the river. In Oceanside, the paleontology crew from San Diego Natural History Museum spent two weeks excavating fossil remains from sedimentary rocks of a large Pleistocene river and oxbow lake. The fossil measures approximately 15.5 inches (39 cm.) The bottom specimen is from the Middle Pleistocene Bay Point Formation in Point Loma and is approximately 220,000 years old. This is a disturbing trend over time, casting a shadow over the future. Within the proboscidean order, where there were once 7 genera of mastodons and mammoths, only these remaining 2 genera of elephants survive, and these also display diminishing populations, due to many factors. These unusual cusped teeth give the mastodon its name, derived from the Greek ("mastos" for breast and odon(t) for tooth.)Īs modern relatives, today only two genera of elephants exist: Loxodonta, the African elephant, and Elephas, the Asian elephant. Mammoths had flat, ridged molars that look like washboards, totally different in appearance from mastodon teeth. Unlike modern elephants and extinct mammoths, the mastodon had molars that featured distinctive, cone-like cusps.
However, the most distinctive feature differentiating mastodons from mammoths is their cheek teeth. Young male mastodons often displayed a short pair of secondary tusks in the lower jaw that were lost as they matured. The tusks were less curved than those of mammoths but larger and longer than elephant tusks. Similar in size to modern-day elephants, with a height of 7 feet (2.1 meters) for females or 10 feet (3.1 meters) for males, adult mastodons weighed as much as 6 tons (5443 kg).Īmerican mastodons had low-domed heads, unlike the higher-domed heads found in mammoths and modern-day Indian elephants. All three, placed within the order Proboscidea, are large, heavy mammals with distinctive flexible trunks and tusks. American mastodons are sometimes confused with their relatives- elephants and mammoths.
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