Name/Title
Mastodon femurDescription
Recovered by Betty Sue Hodges in 1966
The American mastodon (Mammut americanum) is one of the most celebrated and best known fossil mammals of the Pleistocene Epoch. Its fossils have been collected in the thousands and several complete or nearly complete skeletons have been recovered.
American mastodons are sometimes confused with distant relatives, mammoths and elephants. All of them have or had well-developed trunks and tusks, but the mastodons were shorter in hieght, longer in length and more heavily built. The head was larger, but lacked the distinctive "hump"at the crest that is found in the Indian elephant and mammoths. In addition, the mastodon's head was carried horizontally, whereas those of the elephants and mammoths are or were angled down. Preserved hair from one eastern locality indicates that it had a coat of fine wool overlain with long course guard hairs.
The tusks were generally larger and longer than those of modern elephants, but conspicuously less curved than those of mammoths. They extended horizontally from the skull and curved outwards and then inwards. Young males often had a second, short pair of tusks extending from the lower jaw, but these were lost by maturity.
The American mastodon was an adaptable, wide-ranging, and long-lived species; it exhibited remarkably little variation over time or space. It was restricted to North America, but its remains have been found from Alaska and northern Canada to Honduras and from coast to coast; mastodon fossils have even been collected in fisherman's nets as much as 180 miles off the eastern coast of the United States. The earliest records date from 3.7 million years ago (Pliocene). It's generally accepted that this species went extinct between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago.
Skeletal Elements: Fossilized Femur of a Mastadon
Epoch: PleistoceneCollection
Natural History, Permanent Collection