page_title: Mastodon
section_title: Evolution
hierarchical_section_title: Mastodon / Taxonomy / Evolution
caption_attribution_description: English: A Woolly mammoth (left) and an American mastodon (right) facing each other, showing the physical differences between the two animals.
context_page_description: A mastodon is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus Mammut that inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Mastodons lived in herds and were predominantly forest-dwelling animals that lived on a mixed diet obtained by browsing and grazing, somewhat similar to their distant relatives, modern elephants, but probably with greater emphasis on browsing.
  M. americanum, the American mastodon, and M. pacificus, the Pacific mastodon, are the youngest and best-known species of the genus. Mastodons disappeared from North America as part of a mass extinction of most of the Pleistocene megafauna, widely believed to have been caused by overexploitation by Clovis hunters.
context_section_description: Mammut is a genus of the extinct family Mammutidae, related to the proboscidean family Elephantidae (mammoths and elephants), from which it originally diverged approximately 27 million years ago. The following cladogram shows the placement of the American mastodon among other proboscideans, based on hyoid characteristics:
  Over the years, several fossils from localities in North America, Africa and Asia have been attributed to Mammut, but only the North American remains have been named and described, one of them being M. furlongi, named from remains found in the Juntura Formation of Oregon, dating from the late Miocene. However, it is no longer considered valid, leaving only five valid species.
  A complete mtDNA sequence has been obtained from the tooth of an M. americanum skeleton found in permafrost in northern Alaska. The remains are thought to be 50,000 to 130,000 years old. This sequence has been used as an outgroup to refine divergence dates in the evolution of the Elephantidae. The rate of mtDNA sequence change in proboscideans was found to be significantly lower than in primates.
caption: Comparison of woolly mammoth (L) and American mastodon (R)
exif: {}