Ask The Science Experts

While many people today use the words interchangeably, they were actually two different animals. Paleontologists aren’t completely certain, but most think the mastodon appeared first and a side branch led to the mammoth.

The mastodon lived in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North and South America. It appeared in the Oligocene period (25-38 million years ago) and survived until as recent as one million years ago. A full-grown adult was about 10 feet tall and, like the mammoth, was covered in thick woolly hair. It’s tusks were straight and mostly parallel to one another.

The mammoth evolved less than 2 million years ago and lived as recent as 10,000 years ago. It is believed that it lived only in North America, Europe and Asia. The mammoth was somewhat larger than the mastodon and an adult stood between 9 to 15 feet tall. Unlike the mastodon, the mammoth’s tusks had a distinct upward curve.

Most scientists believed that the warming of the earth’s climate after the last ice age is what led to the mammoth’s extinction.

Source: The Handy Science Answer Book available from Amazon.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.