Silence, absence, time
Quiet room ev-er-y day
Holds a final breath.
Extinction arrived
Vegetation and climate
Change? Human hunting?
Interglacials
Squeezed into refugia
Cooler times, moved out.
Last of extinctions
St Paul and Wrangel Islands
Drought? Or less water?
The Wrangel Island
Died four thousand years ago
I wished to see that!
Mastodons belonged
To genus Mammut alone
Fam. Mammutidae.
Miocene epoch
North/Central America
Until Pleistocene.
Distinct lineage
Gone, eleven thousand years
Split from elephants.
Fam. Mammutidae
Not Fam. Elephantidae
Mammoths/elephants.
Mastodons heavy
Build. Robust to live in cold
Short and stocky shape.
Stood seven/ten feet
Mammoths stood nine/eleven
Weighed about the same.
Long, heavy curved tusks
Less dramatic than mammoth's
Grew sixteen feet long.
Low curved heavy tusks
Shaped to use, stripping tree bark
So well adapted.
Their name--'nipple tooth'
Dentition so different
Teeth, blunt, cone-shaped cusps.
Mastodons browers
They thrived in dense spruce forests,
Pine woodlands, and swamps.
Mastodon's flat head
Adapted for forest life
Wide feet for bog life.
Fossil evidence
Shows lived dense populations
Forested valleys.
Matriarchal herds
Adult females and offspring
Mature males alone.
In mating seasons
Mature males, musth' periods
Fossil tusk damage.
Extinction due to
Climate change/overhunting
Quaternary, gone.