“The first suspicions that there are more than one species came from a comparison of several molar teeth that were known to belong to elephants, and which showed considerable differences,” Cuvier explained to his audience, “some having their crown sculpted in a lozenge form, the others in the form of festooned ribbons.” And from the fossil teeth, Cuvier concluded, “These animals thus differ from elephants as much as, or more than, a dog differs from the jackal and the hyena.” Remembered as one of the founders of paleontology, Cuvier was just 27 when he stood before France’s National Institute in 1796 and explained that the elephant bones from Eurasia and those from North America – then referred to the “American Incognitum” – actually belonged to extinct species unlike those alive today.

Elephantine bones found in England, for example, were attributed to behemoths the Romans must have used as pack animals during their occupation, and French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon suggested that huge bones found in Siberia showed that the world was once much warmer and allowed modern elephants to range further afield. This is not a new problem.īack in the late 18th century, when paleontology was a nascent science, many naturalists thought that giant elephant bones found in Europe, northern Eurasia, and America were from modern species that used to live there.

But even worse, the shadow of the woolly mammoth stretches so far that the mastodon is often confused for its shaggy relative. The beast lived at the same time as the famous woolly mammoth, yet the mastodon is not nearly as popular as its tundra-living cousin. I have a soft spot for the American mastodon.

Mastodon animal age