There soon followed discoveries of complete bones and tusks in Ohio.
Similar teeth were found in South Carolina, and some of the African slaves there supposedly recognized them as being similar to the teeth of African elephants. They carried them to the Mississippi River, from where they were transported to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. In 1739 French soldiers at present-day Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky, found the first bones to be collected and studied scientifically. The mystery animal became known as the "incognitum". Mastodons became extinct as part of the Quaternary extinction event that exterminated most Pleistocene megafauna present in the Americas, believed to have been caused by a combination of climate changes at the end of the Pleistocene and hunting by recently arrived Paleo-Indians, as evidenced by a number of kill sites where mastodon remains are associated with human artifacts.Įxhuming the First American Mastodon, 1806 painting by Charles Willson PealeĪ Dutch tenant farmer found the first recorded remnant of Mammut, a tooth some 2.2 kg (5 lb) in weight, in the village of Claverack, New York, in 1705. americanum is inferred to have had a browsing diet with a preference for woody material, distinct from that of the contemporary Columbian mammoth. They lived in herds and were predominantly forest-dwelling animals. pacificus, the Pacific mastodon, are the youngest and best-known species of the genus. americanum, the American mastodon, and M. Mastodons are the most recent members of the family Mammutidae, which diverged from the ancestors of elephants at least 25 million years ago. Mastodons inhabited North and Central America from the late Miocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Koch, 1843)Ī mastodon ( mastós 'breast' + odoús 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus Mammut. In another instance in 2016, a sinkhole in Florida’s Aucilla River (opens in new tab) was declared an "archaeological gold mine" after an ancient human tool and mastodon bones are found inside. For example, on October 16, 1963, Marshal Erb was using a dragline to excavate a pond and found fossils that came to be known as the Perry Mastodon. Sometimes, they are found in unusual places. There have been many mastodon fossil discoveries in the past few hundred years. Not long after, in 1807, Thomas Jefferson personally financed an expedition that was by led William Clark to excavate mastodon and mammoth fossils from the Big Bone Lick site in Kentucky.
The first mastodon fossils were found in 1705, according to the Oregon History Project, when a large tooth and bone fragments were found in the Hudson River Valley in New York. (Image credit: Sergio de la Rosa) Fossil discoveries Sculptures by artist Sergio de la Rosa show three elephant relatives, from left to right: the mastodon, the mammoth and the gomphothere. Coupled with the coming out of the Ice Age and fighting off humans, the species just couldn't survive. It is likely that the disease didn't kill off the animals directly, but made them weak. Though death by disease sounds like a cut-and-dry answer, "Extinction is usually not a one-phenomenon event," Rothschild told Live Science. This led the researchers to think that a tuberculosis pandemic contributed to their extinction. They found that 52 percent of the 113 mastodons they studied had signs of tuberculosis. Others, like researchers 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. Some scientists think that the Earth warmed up from the Ice Age too quickly for the mastodon to adapt or that humans hunted them to extinction. Most of these theories boil down to climate change and/or human hunting, according to Simon Fraser University. Mastodons went extinct around 10,000 years ago. They typically inhabited spruce woodlands around valleys and swamps, according to Cochise College.
Though mastodons appeared primarily in North and Central America, they eventually spread all over the world, in every continent except for Antarctica and Australia.
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