Mammoth

Mammoth Temporal range: Late Miocene to Late Holocene, 6.2–0.004 Ma PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N
Columbian mammoth in the Page Museum in Los Angeles.
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Proboscidea
Family:	Elephantidae
Subfamily:	Elephantinae
Tribe:	Elephantini
Genus:	†Mammuthus Brookes, 1828
Type species
†Elephas primigenius[1][2] Blumenbach, 1799
Species
†M. africanavus †M. columbi †M. creticus †M. exilis †M. lamarmorai †M. meridionalis †M. primigenius †M. rumanus †M. subplanifrons †M. trogontherii
Synonyms
Archidiskodon Pohling, 1888 Parelephas Osborn, 1924 Mammonteus

A mammoth is any species of the extinct elephantid genus Mammuthus. They lived from the late Miocene epoch (from around 6.2 million years ago) into the Holocene about 4,000 years ago, and various species existed in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Mammoths are distinguished from living elephants by their (typically large) spirally twisted tusks and in at least some later species, the development of numerous adaptions to living in cold environments, including a thick layer of fur.

Mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants than to African elephants; if the term "elephant" is considered to be monophylytic, mammoths are a genus of elephants. The oldest mammoth representative, Mammuthus subplanifrons, appeared around 6 million years ago during the late Miocene in what is now southern and Eastern Africa.^[3] Later in the Pliocene, by about three million years ago, mammoths dispersed into Eurasia, eventually covering most of Eurasia before migrating into North America around 1.5–1.3 million years ago, becoming ancestral to the Columbian mammoth (M. columbi). The woolly mammoth (M. primigenius) evolved about 700–400,000 years ago in Siberia, with some surviving on Russia's Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until as recently as roughly 3,700 to 4,000 years ago, still extant during the existence of the earliest civilisations in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.