page_title: Mastodon
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mastodon / History
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: A 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. The mystery animal became known as the "incognitum". In 1739 French soldiers at present-day Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky, found the first bones to be collected and studied scientifically. They carried them to the Mississippi River, from where they were transported to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Similar teeth were found in South Carolina, and some of the  enslaved Africans there supposedly recognized them as being similar to the teeth of African elephants. There soon followed discoveries of complete bones and tusks in Ohio. 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. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach assigned the scientific name Mammut to the American "incognitum" remains in 1799, under the assumption that they belonged to mammoths. 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. In 1817 Cuvier named the "incognitum" Mastodon.
  Cuvier 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.
caption: Exhuming the First American Mastodon, 1806 painting by Charles Willson Peale
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