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. Mastodon as a genus name is obsolete the valid name is Mammut, as that name preceded Cuvier's description, making Mastodon a junior synonym. Ĭuvier assigned the name mastodon (or mastodont) – meaning "breast tooth" ( Ancient Greek: μαστός "breast" and ὀδούς, "tooth"), – for the nipple-like projections on the crowns of the molars. In 1817 Cuvier named the "incognitum" Mastodon. Other anatomists noted that the teeth of mammoths and elephants differed from those of the "incognitum", which possessed rows of large conical cusps, indicating that they were dealing with a distinct species. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach assigned the scientific name Mammut to the American "incognitum" remains in 1799, under the assumption that they belonged to mammoths. People started referring to the "incognitum" as a "mammoth", like the ones that were being dug out in Siberia – in 1796 the French anatomist Georges Cuvier proposed the radical idea that mammoths were not simply elephant bones that had been somehow transported north, but a species which no longer existed. There soon followed discoveries of complete bones and tusks in Ohio. Similar teeth were found in South Carolina, and some of the African slaves there supposedly recognized them as being similar to the teeth of African elephants. They carried them to the Mississippi River, from where they were transported to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. In 1739 French soldiers at present-day Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky, found the first bones to be collected and studied scientifically. The mystery animal became known as the "incognitum". Mastodons became extinct as part of the Quaternary extinction event that exterminated most Pleistocene megafauna present in the Americas, believed to have been caused by a combination of climate changes at the end of the Pleistocene and hunting by recently arrived Paleo-Indians, as evidenced by a number of kill sites where mastodon remains are associated with human artifacts.Įxhuming the First American Mastodon, 1806 painting by Charles Willson PealeĪ Dutch tenant farmer found the first recorded remnant of Mammut, a tooth some 2.2 kg (5 lb) in weight, in the village of Claverack, New York, in 1705. americanum is inferred to have had a browsing diet with a preference for woody material, distinct from that of the contemporary Columbian mammoth. They lived in herds and were predominantly forest-dwelling animals. pacificus, the Pacific mastodon, are the youngest and best-known species of the genus. americanum, the American mastodon, and M. Mastodons are the most recent members of the family Mammutidae, which diverged from the ancestors of elephants at least 25 million years ago. Mastodons inhabited North and Central America from the late Miocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Koch, 1843)Ī mastodon ( mastós 'breast' + odoús 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus Mammut.
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