Mammoths are part of the Proboscidea order of the Class Mamalia. The origin of mammoths, from which the present elephants evolved, is in Africa. This process took place 60 million years ago.
The first species of mammoths appeared in Asia after a migration from Africa. They have adapted to quite difficult living conditions considering that they lived in a glacial period 80,000 million years ago.
To survive mammoths migrated to Europe in winter, where conditions were better. Mammoths even reached North America through the Bering isthmus formed 3 million years ago, during the other ice ages.
The Isthmus united North America with Asia. The extinction of mammoths was caused mainly by two reasons: the excessive hunting practiced by Neanderthals and modern humans, the second reason being the global warming that caused the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago.
The word mammoth comes from the Russian language. It consists of two words: Earth and horn (Earth, horn). In English the word translates as "big", "massive".
Features
The thick, curved tusks are longer than elephants.The largest known species is the Songhua River mammoth (Mammuthus sungari) has reached heights of over 5m at shoulder level. Mammoths generally weigh around 8 tons, and the largest males can frequently exceed 12 tons. Most mammoth species are said to have been almost the size of a modern-day elephant.
Fossils of dwarf mammoths have been found in the Anglo-Norman Islands (Mammuthus Exilis), the island of sardinia (Mammuthus Lamarmorae) and Wrangel Island in northern Siberia. a mammoth foot was discovered in Illinois in 2005.
Extinction
The dwarf mammoth was the last species in existence. Most of the mammoth population lived in North America and Eurasia during the latter part of the ice age. Until recently it was known that mammoths disappeared about 10,000 years before Christ, but new evidence shows that some species lived until around 8,000 B.C. The Dwarf mammoth population that survived the longest lived in Alaska until 3,750 B.C.
One explanation for the extinction of mammoths is global warming. Rising sea levels, the appearance of forests instead of open grasslands reduced the mammoth's habitat. Evidence of the presence of mammoths is still being discovered in Russia. They are found in ice at depths between 1m and 1km.
