mammoth

                               mammoth                                                                                                                                             

  The mammoth or the behemoth / is a genus of elephantine mammals of the elephant family, and it is a huge extinct elephant that lived in Central Europe a million years ago. The first complete body of a mammoth elephant was discovered at the mouth of the Lena River in northern Siberia, buried under a layer of ice that preserved it completely intact for thousands of years, in 1798, with hooked tusks and wild hair. He lived with the woolly rhinoceros and the huge saber-toothed tiger                                                                                                                 

      The largest known species, the Giant Songhua River Mammoth, reached a height of at least 5 meters (16 feet) to the shoulder. Mammoths usually weighed about 6 to 8 tons, but the exceptionally large males weighed more than 12 tons.

However, most species of mammoths were as large as modern Asian elephants. Fossils of pygmy mammoth species have been found in California's Channel Islands (Mammoth spasm) and the Mediterranean island of Sardinia (Mammoth Lamarmori) There was also a race of pygmy woolly mammoths on Warangel Island in northern Siberia, in the Arctic Circle                                                                                                             Cross-section of mammoth footprints (a type of fossil track) at the Hot Springs Mammoth Site in South Dakota, an 11-foot (3.4-meter) long calf was discovered. While the herd lived, their social structure was probably the same as that of African and Asian elephants, with females that Live in herds headed by matriarchs, solitary lives or form expanding groups after sexual maturity