American Mastodon Teeth Close Up | Case Study In Taxonomy (2019)

Credits to Wiki and Canada Museaum of Nature
American mastodons were among the largest living land animals during the ice age. They ranged from Alaska and Yukon to central Mexico, and from the Pacific to Atlantic coasts.

Compared to living elephants and mammoths, American mastodons were squatter—from 2 to 3 m (7 to 10 ft.) in shoulder height—and longer—about 4.5 m

Their upper tusks extended or more beyond the sockets, and some mastodons had vestigial tusks in their lower jaws. The tusks were probably used for breaking off branches of conifer trees to eat.

Their cheek teeth consisted of paired, blunt cones covered with thick enamel—useful for browsing on trees and shrubs. Coarse, reddish hair has been found on the best-preserved specimens.

Their preferred habitat was open spruce woodlands, spruce forests and marsh. Their diet included conifer twigs and cones, leaves, coarse grasses, mosses and swamp plants.

In Canada, most mastodon remains (more than 60 specimens by 2008) have been found in deposits that postdate the last glaciation in southern Ontario. Fossils have been found in every province and territory except Nunavut, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island.

Mastodons (Greek: μαστός "breast" and ὀδούς, "tooth") are any species of extinct proboscideans in the genus Mammut (family Mammutidae), distantly related to elephants, that inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.[1] Mastodons lived in herds and were predominantly forest-dwelling animals that fed on a mixed diet obtained by browsing and grazing with a seasonal preference for browsing, similar to living elephants.

M. americanum, the American mastodon, is the youngest and best-known species of the genus. They disappeared from North America as part of a mass extinction of most of the Pleistocene megafauna, widely believed to have been caused by overexploitation by Clovis hunters, and possibly also by climate change.

The first remnant of Mammut, a tooth some 2.2 kg (5 lb) in weight, was discovered in the village of Claverack, New York, in 1705. The mystery animal became known as the "incognitum".[ The first bones to be collected and studied scientifically were found in 1739 at Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky, by French soldiers, who carried them to the Mississippi River, from where they were transported to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.[ Some time later, similar teeth were found in South Carolina, which, according to the slaves, looked remarkably similar to those of African elephants. This was soon followed by discoveries of complete bones and tusks in Ohio; people started referring to the "incognitum" as a mammoth, like the ones that were being dug out in Siberia.[ Anatomists noted that the teeth of mammoth and elephants were different from those of the "incognitum", which possessed rows of large conical cusps, indicating that they were dealing with a distinct species. In 1806 the French anatomist Georges Cuvier named the incognitum "mastodon".[

The name mastodon (or mastodont) means "breast tooth" (Ancient Greek: μαστός "breast" and ὀδούς, "tooth"),[ and was assigned by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1817, for the nipple-like projections on the crowns of its molars.

Mastodon as a genus name is obsolete;[the valid name is Mammut, a name that preceded Cuvier's description, making Mastodon a junior synonym. The change was met with resistance, and authors sometimes applied "Mastodon" as an informal name; consequently it became the common term for members of the genus.