Mastodon

This article is about the prehistoric elephant. For other uses of the word see Mastodon (disambiguation)

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A Mastodon skeleton in museum in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Mastodons or Mastodonts are members of an extinct genus Mammut of the order Proboscidea; they resembled, but were distinct from, the woolly mammoth.

The American mastodon (Mammut americanum) lived in North America. They first appeared almost four million years ago and became extinct approximately 10,000 years ago. They were furry, and had a height of about three meters. They differed from mammoths primarily in the blunt, conical shape of their teeth [1], which were more suited to chewing leaves than to grazing; the name mastodon (or mastodont) means mastoid teeth (Greek μαστός and ὀδούς, "nipple tooth"), and is also an obsolete name for their genus.

The tusks of the mastodon sometimes exceeded five meters in length. Their meat was a food source for early humans, and archeologists are still trying to determine what role, if any, the early human settlers of North America played in the extinction of the mastodon.