#pachyderms

St. Nicholas: Volume 11, part 1. May, November, 1883 - April, 1884. Conducted by Mary Mapes Dodge. Illustration by J. M. Nugent.

Woolly mammoth artistic reconstruction (left, Mammuthus primigenius) and american mastodon (right, Mammut americanum.)

Artwork by Dantheman9758

- Evolutionarily, mammoths and mastodons split from a shared ancestor about 25-28 million years ago. While they look similar visually, they also exhibited some differences.

- Both had holarctic distributions and went extinct around 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, signaling the end of the pleistocene. Interestingly, isolated island mammoth populations stuck around as late as 4,000 years ago. This means mammoths would have still been alive at the same time the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built.

- Mastodons adapted to a variety of environmental conditions, though preferring coniferous and deciduous forests. They could tolerate both freezing temperatures and sub-tropical conditions.

- Mammoths were adapted to colder, boreal landscapes such as the tundra and open plains. The did not tolerate sub-tropical conditions well.

- Mastodons were primarily browsers, their diets consisted of shrubs, twigs, barks, conifer needles, and leaves. They had sharp, pointed molars to help chew woody branches.

- Mammoths were primarily grazers, their diet consisted of grasses, sedges, mosses, and lichens. They had flattened molars to help grind the plant material.

- Mastodons were smaller and somewhat robust. They had relatively shorter limbs, and a flatter skull.

- Mammoths were larger. They had slightly longer limbs and a prominent “humped” skull.

- Mastodon tusks did not curve as dramatically.

- Mammoths had massive, curved tusks.

Photo by Daniel Mann — Difference between mastodon molar (left) and mammoth molar (right.)

When you see a White Rhino you may make the observation that they aren't particularly "white". That may be because the "white" in White Rhino probably comes from the Afrikaans word "weit" or wide, describing the rhinos square lip. The shape of the lip is an adaptation for the way they eat: all grazing, all the time.

So I was really excited about this round of critiques on my novel chapter. I thought maybe I had finally knocked it out of the park this time. Nope. Still lots of work to do. Guess I’d better work on growing that thick skin...oh well!  That’s the writing life!

World Elephant Day, August 12

For World Elephant Day we present these wood engravings from The Naturalist’s Library by the American naturalist Augustus A. Gould, published in New York by E. Kearny, in the 1850s. We both revere and exploit these magnificent entities, and World Elephant Day was established to bring light to the realities of elephant life and culture, and to preserve and protect the elephants of the world that have been designated as either “Vulnerable” (African elephants) or “Endangered” (Asian elephants).

This mid-19th-century textbook on the natural world opens its section on elephants with, “The human race excepted, the elephant is the most respectable of animals.” It goes on to describe the virtues, physical qualities, and behavior of elephants, but also spends considerable space discussing their usefulness to humans as beasts of burden, engines of warfare, and as objects of curiosity. Oddly, however, almost nothing is mentioned about the value of elephant ivory, which has devastating effects on elephant populations today. Still, then as today, elephants tend to be conceptualized in relationship to their usefulness to humans, and World Elephant Day is an opportunity to disabuse ourselves of this conceptualization.  All species of elephants face the real possibility of extinction in the next 20 years. Today is the day one can begin to think on this.

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