Tagged: Mastodon

Unikonta
Mastodons (Greek: μαστός “breast” and ὀδούς, “tooth”) were large, proboscidean mammal species of the extinct genus Mammut that inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 11,000 years ago. The American mastodon is the most recent and best-known species of the genus.
While mastodons had a size and appearance similar to elephants and mammoths, they were not particularly closely related. Their teeth differ dramatically from those of members of the elephant family; they had blunt, conical, nipple-like projections on the crowns of their molars, which were more suited to chewing leaves than the high-crowned teeth mammoths used for grazing; the name mastodon (or mastodont) means “nipple teeth” and is also an obsolete name for their genus. Their skulls are larger and flatter than those of mammoths, while their skeleton is stockier and more robust.
Mammut is a genus of the extinct family Mammutidae,…