Elephants Elephants are the largest living land mammals.
There have been more than 500 different kinds of elephants on the Earth at various times over the last 55 million years. They are restricted to tropical climates, but other species, living long ago, were more adapted to colder climates. These include the mammoths. In northern areas of the world, mammoth finds tend to cluster in time periods when exposed soil and moisture were moving sediments downslope and especially when sediments are moving in front of glaciers. Ironically, these were times when mammoths were not particularly abundant, but it was more likely that bones lying on the ground would get buried during these conditions.