page_title: Mastodon
section_title: Social behavior
hierarchical_section_title: Mastodon / Paleobiology / Social behavior
caption_attribution_description: English: Mounted male (left) and female Mammut americanum skeletons at the new (2019) University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The male specimen is a cast of the skeleton of the Buesching mastodon (named after its discoverer) that was excavated from a peat bog near Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is thought (based on an unhealed puncture wound on the right side of its skull) to have been killed by a thrust of the tusk of a rival male.&#91;1&#93; The female was recovered near Owosso, Michigan. Both sets of fossils date to about 11,000 years ago. The male skeleton is mounted over a replica of a mastodon trackway found at the Brennan mastodon site near Saline, Michigan. See also: 3-D Viewers of male and female mastodon skeletons at the University of Michigan Mammutidae digital fossil repository, and On the Trail of Mastodons (video)
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: Based on the characteristics of mastodon bone sites, it can be inferred that, as in modern proboscideans, the mastodon social group consisted of adult females and young, living in bonded groups called mixed herds. The males abandoned the mixed herds once reaching sexual maturity and lived either alone or in male bond groupings. As in modern elephants, there probably was no seasonal synchrony of mating activity, with both males and females seeking out each other for mating when sexually active.
caption: M. americanum male and female, University of Michigan
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