The Less Woolly Cousin

(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.