America Had Two Kinds of Elephants, and They Weren't Related | Full Documentary
America's Lost Animals
26,646 views
North America had elephants. Not one kind, but several, moving in herds across the same ground where American cities and farms now stand. Two of them dominate the fossil record. The Columbian mammoth stood thirteen feet at the shoulder and weighed close to ten tons, a towering grassland giant with sweeping spiral tusks. The American mastodon was shorter but longer and heavier through the body, a stocky forest browser built like a battering ram. And almost everyone alive today confuses the two.
That confusion runs deeper than most people realize. These animals ate different food, lived in different landscapes, and belonged to families that separated more than twenty-five million years before either of them existed. A mammoth is more closely related to the elephants alive right now than it ever was to a mastodon. In this full documentary we separate them completely: how to tell them apart at a glance, why their teeth explain everything, and how one of them forced the scientific world to accept that extinction is real.
From Big Bone Lick to the tar pits of Los Angeles, from Thomas Jefferson sending explorers west to search for living giants to the last mammoths dying on an Arctic island while the pyramids stood, this is the complete history of America's two elephants and the world they left behind.
🎬 Explore more of Prehistoric America: America's Prehistoric Animals Documentaries
CHAPTERS
00:00 The Giants Everyone Confuses
01:42 Two Giants, One Continent
08:44 The Teeth Tell Everything
16:02 Not Cousins at All
23:58 Two Different Americas
31:46 The Beast That Proved Extinction
39:23 The World They Shared With Us
46:50 The Vanishing
56:20 A Quieter Continent
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
• La Brea Tar Pits & Museum — mammoth and mastodon comparison, Pit 91 proboscidean material, the specimen nicknamed Zed
• Natural History Museum of Utah — mammoth vs mastodon teeth, diet and habitat differences
• Science News — Chris Widga interview on body proportions and Columbian mammoth range
• Zazula et al. 2014, PNAS — re-dating of Arctic and Subarctic mastodon fossils; regional extinction before human arrival
• McMaster Ancient DNA Centre — mastodon mitochondrial DNA and repeated north-south range shifts
• Cincinnati Museum Center / Smithsonian — Big Bone Lick, the incognitum, Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark instructions
• Cuvier 1806 — original naming of the mastodon from molar morphology; the establishment of extinction as a scientific fact
• White Sands National Park research — Columbian mammoth trackways and trample grounds
#Mammoth #Mastodon #IceAge #Megafauna #Paleontology
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America Had Two Kinds of Elephants, and They Weren't Related | Full Documentary
America's Lost Animals
26,646 views
North America had elephants. Not one kind, but several, moving in herds across the same ground where American cities and farms now stand. Two of them dominate the fossil record. The Columbian mammoth stood thirteen feet at the shoulder and weighed close to ten tons, a towering grassland giant with sweeping spiral tusks. The American mastodon was shorter but longer and heavier through the body, a stocky forest browser built like a battering ram. And almost everyone alive today confuses the two.
That confusion runs deeper than most people realize. These animals ate different food, lived in different landscapes, and belonged to families that separated more than twenty-five million years before either of them existed. A mammoth is more closely related to the elephants alive right now than it ever was to a mastodon. In this full documentary we separate them completely: how to tell them apart at a glance, why their teeth explain everything, and how one of them forced the scientific world to accept that extinction is real.
From Big Bone Lick to the tar pits of Los Angeles, from Thomas Jefferson sending explorers west to search for living giants to the last mammoths dying on an Arctic island while the pyramids stood, this is the complete history of America's two elephants and the world they left behind.
🎬 Explore more of Prehistoric America: America's Prehistoric Animals Documentaries
CHAPTERS
00:00 The Giants Everyone Confuses
01:42 Two Giants, One Continent
08:44 The Teeth Tell Everything
16:02 Not Cousins at All
23:58 Two Different Americas
31:46 The Beast That Proved Extinction
39:23 The World They Shared With Us
46:50 The Vanishing
56:20 A Quieter Continent
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
• La Brea Tar Pits & Museum — mammoth and mastodon comparison, Pit 91 proboscidean material, the specimen nicknamed Zed
• Natural History Museum of Utah — mammoth vs mastodon teeth, diet and habitat differences
• Science News — Chris Widga interview on body proportions and Columbian mammoth range
• Zazula et al. 2014, PNAS — re-dating of Arctic and Subarctic mastodon fossils; regional extinction before human arrival
• McMaster Ancient DNA Centre — mastodon mitochondrial DNA and repeated north-south range shifts
• Cincinnati Museum Center / Smithsonian — Big Bone Lick, the incognitum, Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark instructions
• Cuvier 1806 — original naming of the mastodon from molar morphology; the establishment of extinction as a scientific fact
• White Sands National Park research — Columbian mammoth trackways and trample grounds
#Mammoth #Mastodon #IceAge #Megafauna #Paleontology