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| (C) Charles R. Knight |
This blog has covered many woolly mammals. We are going to continue discussing mammals, of course, because I said that November would be a mammal month. This makes some good friends of mine happy. Making them even happier, this week is going to be all about a Proboscidean. We have previously spent a week on Woolly Mammoths, but this week we will be talking about the less famous, but equally important genus
Mammut. The genus
Mammut includes four recognized species:
M. americanum Kerr, 1972 (type specimen
Elephas americanum was reassigned to
Mammut);
M. matthewi Osborn, 1921;
M. raki Frick, 1933; and
M. cosoensis Schultz, 1937. These species are all from the Late Miocene/Pliocene spanning to the Late Pleistocene and lived in North and Central America and are distantly related to elephants, at most. I hope this week we can get some professional communication from people that have studied mammoths and mastodons, because there are some important differences between the two and having a technical comparison would be a neat treat to say the least.
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