This chart is missing the very earliest mammoth, the African mammoth, but otherwise seems pretty complete. The Southern Mammoth was the next one to appear after the African one, and is most well known from southern Europe during an interglacial. This evolved into the more northerly steppe mammoth (including the specimen from the Songhua River, which was actually a chimera and is overstated.) The Steppe mammoth crossed Berengia into North America where it evolved into the Columbian mammoth. In situ it evolved into the Woolly Mammoth which also crossed Berengia. There are reasons to believe that the Columbian and Woolly mammoths overlapped at some point in their range and even crossbred.
But the Woolly wasn't really very big. Other than the pygmy mammoths, it was the smallest, actually, and would have been notably smaller than an African elephant, whereas the bigger Columbian and steppe mammoths would have been bigger. While the Asian elephant is today among the smallest of the family, it was about the same size as the mastodon, and another species in the same Elephas genus, recki, was among the largest elephants known prehistorically (although some specialists have put that in the same genus as the straight-tusked elephant, Paleoloxodon instead of Elephas.)
It's also debatable to what degree these various mammoths were hairy (except for the woolly one, of course.) Because some of them lived in cooler climates than do today's elephants, they may have been more hairy than the elephants of today, but then again some of them did not (all of the mammoths originally come from Africa, and Columbian mammoths ranged as far south as central Mexico.)
Sigh. I miss elephants. I miss a lot of the megafauna that we used to have, but the American elephant is probably one of the ones I miss the most. Along with the saber-tooth, of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment