American Mastodon – Late Miocene-Late Pleistocene (5.3-0.011 Ma)Welcome, one and all, to a new

American Mastodon – Late Miocene-Late Pleistocene (5.3-0.011 Ma)

Welcome, one and all, to a new feature on the blog, where I listen to music and review it! Today’s band is Mastodon, who I think is from Scandinavia? I dunno, I listened to one of their albums once and it was alright. 7/10. Join us tomorrow for a review of Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer!

But really, today’s animal is the mastodon. Specifically, M. americanum, the American mastodon. This is the youngest animal we’ve talked about so far, living from the late Miocene all the way to the end of the Pleistocene, about 10-11,000 years ago. It was first discovered in New York in 1705, a hundred years before paleontology proper was even an established science.

It lived all over North America during the last glacial period, and lived and looked much like an elephant. There were some key differences that can help you identify a mastodon from a mammoth or an elephant. They were stockier, with shorter legs and bigger muscles. Their tusks were really something, around 8 feet (5 meters) long. That’s longer than your modern elephants’ tusks, but shorter than a mammoth’s. They also had smaller ears than their modern cousins, to conserve heat. Modern elephants have such big floppy ears to keep cool, which mastodons absolutely did not need to do.

Where, oh where, did the mastodon go? It was one of the animals implicated in Quaternary extinction, which was when a bunch of big animals died out at the end of the last glacial period, for a lot of different reasons. Some animals stump us with how they managed to get wiped out, but we have a very likely suspect for mastodons.

This would normally be the part where I describe the suspect in vague terms and eventually reveal the suspect with the expectation that you’d be all like “Oh shit!” But I think you know where I’m going with this so I’m gonna cut right to it. It’s people. People probably killed mastodons to death. Paleo-indian people arrived in the Americas 13,000 years ago, and, well, we munched down on them and they went extinct.

Do you guys like taxonomy? Because I do! Taxonomy is the sorting system we use for living things, based on their relation to each other. It deals with assigning names and classifications to animals. The old mantra you had to memorize in school, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, etc., that’s taxonomy. It’s a million times more jumbled and complicated than I was led to believe initially, but I learned some fun things about Mastodon taxonomy while researching it.

Mastodons aren’t as closely-related to elephants as mammoths are. Mammoths, for reference, are really closely-related to modern elephants. In fact, they’re more closely-related to Asian elephants than both species of African elephant. They were essentially fluffier elephants. Mastodons, though, diverged way earlier, splitting around 38 million years ago. Wack.

You may have also noticed I’m not italicizing or capitalizing “mastodon,” like I do with every other animal I’ve talked about so far. That’s because “mastodon” isn’t the genus name for this animal. It used to be, though. There’s a rule in taxonomy, where the first name given to an animal always wins out. If a genus turns out to be synonymous with another, that animal’s name changes to the older one. That’s why Brontosaurus is called Apatosaurus now. Well, there’s more to that, but let’s stay out of that for now.

This animal was given the name “Mastodon” in 1817. Buuuuuuut, scientific writer Robert Kerr had named it Mammut americanum in 1792, so that name took priority, so its official genus is Mammut. People thought “mastodon” sounded better, though (even though it means “nipple tooth…”) and used it as an informal name, so that’s what it’s known by most popularly. It’s not “wrong” to call it mastodon, in the same way it’s not wrong to call an Equus a horse. It’s just not its genus name.

That does it for today’s taxonomy lesson. I liked mastodons as a kid, but let’s be real, who didn’t? Ice age animals are really cool, and I’m willing to bet there are very few children who saw something like this in a book and said “Eh, whatever.” Elephants are cool, so taking something like it, covering it in fur and giving it bigger tusks and saying “It’s not here anymore” makes them even more exciting. I talked about mastodons today because so far, I haven’t really given Cenozoic mammals enough attention. I also really wanted to practice drawing mammals because I’m bad at it.

Au revoir! I haven’t decided what the next animal will be, but expect something decidedly Mesozoic.