One day, about 11,000 years ago, a lone bull mastodon plodded through the shallows of a lake in what today is Michigan. Some time later, three females and a gamboling calf passed the same way. Luckily for paleontologists, clay-rich mud filled the animals’ footprints, preserving the tracks and giving scientists insights into the mastodons’ social structure. The long-extinct creatures likely lived in matriarchal herds, while mature males roamed singly, much like their modern-day relatives: elephants.
Today, elephant numbers have dwindled, as has their range. They’re now considered vulnerable in Africa and endangered in Asia. But during the Pleistocene epoch, between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago, elephants and their diverse relatives stomped across an impressive swath of the globe, from the Arctic to South America. Even back then, elephants were the most plentiful, diverse and widely distributed of this group, the Proboscidea. It also included mammoths, mastodons, and less well-known members such as stegodons and gomphotheres. Their trunks and tusks make them all recognizable cousins.
Thanks to fossils, preserved tracks, recent finds of proboscideans frozen in permafrost, and new technologies used to probe these ancient lineages, researchers are learning more about the lives and deaths of proboscideans, says Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Dick Mol and colleagues’ find of the bones of the Yukagir Mammoth in Siberia inspired the creation of this replica of the extinct animal, tusks, hair and all. (Credit: Remie Bakker, Manimal Works, Rotterdam)
