mammoth
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 until about 4,000 years ago, with mammoth species at various times inhabi ...
that lived during the
Pliocene
The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch (geology), epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.33 to 2.58
Evolution
''Mammuthus rumanus'' is suggested to have originated in Africa. Material intermediate between African mammoths and ''Mammuthus rumanus'' has been reported from
Bethlehem
Bethlehem is a city in the West Bank, Palestine, located about south of Jerusalem, and the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate. It had a population of people, as of . The city's economy is strongly linked to Tourism in the State of Palesti ...
in the Levant, dating to sometime in the Late Pliocene, around 3-4 million years ago. The oldest calibrated dates for ''Mammuthus rumanus'' and mammoths outside Africa are from Romania, dating to around 3.2 million years ago. Remains have been reported spanning from Britain to China. It is probably ancestral to ''
Mammuthus meridionalis
''Mammuthus meridionalis'', sometimes called the southern mammoth, is an extinct species of mammoth native to Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene. Reaching a size exceeding modern elephants, unlike later Eurasian mammoth species, it was largely ...
''Mammuthus rumanus'' is only known from fragmentary remains, typically isolated teeth, with a mandible also known. The number of plates on the third molar teeth is around 8-10, consistently lower than is known in other non-African mammoth species, including ''M. meridionalis.''
Ecology
Studies of specimens from Britain found that they likely consumed
browse
Browsing is a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something of relevance for the browsing organism. In context of humans, it is a metaphor taken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing open sh ...
and inhabited open environments. In Europe, it coexisted alongside other proboscideans, including the mastodon species ''
"Mammut" borsoni
''"Mammut" borsoni'' (sometimes called Borson's mastodon) is an extinct species of mammutid proboscidean known from the Late Miocene to Early Pleistocene of Eurasia, spanning from western Europe to China. It is the last known mammutid in Eurasi ...
'' and the "tetralophodont
gomphothere
Gomphotheres are an extinct group of proboscideans related to modern elephants. First appearing in Africa during the Oligocene, they dispersed into Eurasia and North America during the Miocene and arrived in South America during the Pleistocene a ...
niche partitioning
In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition.
Three variants of ecological niche are described by
It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for e ...
with the latter by occupying different habitats.''''