Mammoth Tusk, replica

Woolly Mammoth Tusk. Replica. Mammuthus meridionalis. The Southern Elephant. California Simi Valley. Miocene Europe,Siberia, North America. Moor Park City specimen. Size 2.7meter/9 feet. A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans (elephants or their extinct relatives) were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair. They lived from the Pliocene epoch from 4.8 million years ago to around 4,500 years ago. Most mammoths died out at the end of the last Ice Age. A definitive explanation for their mass extinction is yet to be agreed upon. A small population survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 6000 BC,[2] and the small mammoths of Wrangel Island became extinct only around 2000 BC[4]

About 12000 years ago, warmer, wetter weather was beginning to take hold. Rising sea levels swamped the coastal regions. Forests replaced open woodlands and grasslands across the continent.The Ice Age was ebbing. As their habitats disappeared, so did the bison and the mammoth.

It is a common misconception that mammoths were much larger than modern elephants, an error that has led to "mammoth" being used as an adjective meaning "very big". Certainly, the largest known species, the Imperial Mammoth of California, reached heights of at least 5 metres (16 feet) at the shoulder. Mammoths would probably normally weigh in the region of 6 to 8 tonnes, but exceptionally large males may have exceeded 12 tonnes. A 3.3 m. (11 ft.) long mammoth tusk was discovered north of Lincoln, Illinois in 2005.[5] However, most species of mammoth were only about as large as a modern Asian Elephant. Fossils of species of dwarf mammoth have been found on the Californian Channel Islands (Mammuthus exilis) and the Mediterranean island of Sardinia (Mammuthus lamarmorae). There was also a race of dwarf woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, within the Arctic Circle.