Mastodon tooth

A cygolo phodon mastodon tooth

From the late miascene period

from Neimenggu, Inner Mongolia, China

Mastodons are thought to have first appeared almost four million years ago. They were native to both Eurasia and North America but the Eurasian species died out approximately three million years ago - fossils having been found in England, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and northern Greece.

Though their habitat spanned a large territory, mastodons were most common in the ice age spruce forests of the eastern United States, as well as in warmer lowland environments. Their remains have been found as far as 300 kilometres offshore of the north-eastern United States, in areas that were dry land during the low sea level stand of the last ice age.

While mastodons were furry like woolly mammoths and similar in height at roughly three meters at the shoulder, the resemblance was superficial. They differed from mammoths primarily in the blunt, conical, nipple-like projections on the crowns of their molars, which were more suited to chewing leaves than the high-crowned teeth mammoths used for grazing; the name mastodon means "nipple teeth" and is also an obsolete name for their genus. Their skulls were larger and flatter than those of mammoths, while their skeleton was stockier and more robust. Mastodons also seem to have lacked the undercoat characteristic of mammoths.