This is a feature we need to explore further, but our data is a bit limited. Mammut pacificus has a thicker femur for a given length. pacificus sacrals, including the one below from Diamond Valley Lake, have six. There has been one American mastodon reported with six sacrals, and another reported with four (although I have not personally seen either of these specimens), but all the other specimens for which we could get data (five of them) have five sacrals. Mammut pacificus has six sacral vertebrae, while M. This trend is present in every tooth position except the upper 2nd molars, although we had the best statistical support for the 3rd molars. On the left below is a lower third molar from Max, and on the right is the same tooth from an American mastodon from Ohio (from the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science). Mammut pacificus has narrower teeth than M. So, what makes the Pacific mastodon different from the American mastodon? Here are the major characters: Sometime in late 2017, we started to consider the possibility that we were seeing these differences because we were dealing with two different species, and by mid-2018 we started working on a manuscript. Exploring this problem continued through the Valley of the Mastodons symposium in 2017. To that end, in 2016 we launched a crowdfunding campaign on to allow us to gather mastodon measurements from other parts of the continent. A group of us started exploring that issue, trying to determine what was going on. Four years ago, I stumbled across the fact that California mastodons have different tooth proportions than other mastodons. The big news this week for Western Science Center was the naming of a new species of mastodon, Mammut pacificus.įor decades, the consensus on Pleistocene mastodons (which I shared) was that in North America there was only a single, widespread species, Mammut americanum.
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