A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans are members of Elephantidae, the family of elephants
and mammoths, and close relatives of modern elephants. They were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species,
a covering of long hair. They lived from the Pliocene epoch from around 4.8 million to 4,500 years ago.
The Asian or Asiatic Elephant (Elephas maximus), sometimes known by the name of one of its subspecies – the Indian Elephant,
is one of the three living species of elephant, and the only living species of the genus Elephas. It is the largest living
land animal in Asia. The species is found primarily in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Indochina and parts of Nepal and Indonesia,
Viet Nam and Thailand.
African elephants are the species of elephants in the genus Loxodonta, one of the two existing genera in Elephantidae. Although
it is commonly believed that the genus was named by Georges Cuvier in 1825, Cuvier spelled it Loxodonte. An anonymous author
romanized the spelling to Loxodonta and the ICZN recognizes this as the proper authority. Fossil Loxodonta have only been
found in Africa, where they developed in the middle Pliocene.
Mastodons or mastodonts were large tusked mammal species of the extinct genus Mammut found in Asia, Africa, Europe, North
America and Central America from the Oligocene through Pleistocene, 33.9 mya to 11,000 years ago. The American mastodon is
the most recent and best known species of the group. Confusingly, several genera of proboscids from the gomphothere family
have similar-sounding names but are actually more closely related to elephants than to mastodons.
The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), also called the tundra mammoth, is an extinct species of mammoth. This animal
is known from bones and frozen carcasses from northern North America and northern Eurasia with the best preserved carcasses
in Siberia. This mammoth species was first recorded in (possibly 150,000 years old) deposits of the second last glaciation
in Eurasia. They were derived from steppe mammoths (Mammuthus trogontherii).
The African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana) is the larger of the two species of African elephant. Both it and the African
Forest Elephant have usually been classified as a single species, known simply as the African Elephant. Some authorities still
consider the currently available evidence insufficient for splitting the African Elephant into two species. It is also known
as the Bush Elephant or Savanna Elephant.
