American Mastodon Tooth Replica

$60.00

Mastodons were large elephant-like mammals that lived 33 million years ago until 10,000 years ago. Mastodon fossils have been found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia.

Description

American Mastodon Tooth Replica measures 7 inches long by 4.5 inches wide. American Mastodon Tooth Replica is museum quality Cast in durable Polyurethane resins. Made in USA. Our precise tooth can be used as a teaching tool, museum tooth exhibit, home décor tooth or office décor tooth.

American Mastodons or Mammut americanum are any species of extinct proboscideans in the genus Mammut (family Mammutidae), distantly related to elephants, 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.

They lived in herds and were predominantly forest-dwelling animals that fed on a mixed diet obtained by browsing and grazing with a seasonal preference for browsing, similar to living elephants.

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.

Modern reconstructions based on partial and skeletal remains reveal that American Mastodons or Mammut americanum were very similar in appearance to elephants and, to a lesser degree, mammoths, though not closely related to either one.

Compared to mammoths, they had shorter legs, a longer body and were more heavily muscled, a build similar to that of the current Asian elephants.

Like modern elephants, the females were smaller than the males. They had a low and long skull with long curved tusks, with those of the males being more massive and more strongly curved.

American Mastodons or Mammut americanum had cusp-shaped teeth, very different from mammoth and elephant teeth (which have a series of enamel plates), well-suited for chewing leaves and branches of trees and shrubs.

American Mastodons or Mammut americanum have been characterized as predominantly browsing animals. Of New World proboscids, they appear to have been the most consistent in browsing rather than grazing.

Most accounts of gut contents have identified coniferous twigs as the dominant element in their diet. Study of mastodon teeth microwear patterns indicates that mastodons could adjust their diet according to the ecosystem, with regionally specific feeding patterns corresponding to boreal forest versus cypress swamps.

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Additional information

Weight 1 lbs
Dimensions 7.1 in
Mastodon Tooth

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Proboscidea
Family: †Mammutidae
Genus: †Mammut
Type species: †Elephas americanum
Species: †M. americanum
Conservation Status: Extinct