General information about the Columbian Mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) aka Monty
The word mammoth comes from the Russian 'mamot' and 'mamont' and possibly from the Tartar 'Mamma', which means 'earth', and, courtesy of Fiffolle, according to the Oxford English Distionary, it comes from the old Vogul word mēmoŋt meaning 'earth-horn'. The name may reflect the folk belief that the animal lives in burrows underground as that was where the bones were discovered.
The Columbian mammoth was described from a partial upper molar found in a 1838 excavation of the Brunswick Altamaha Canal in the American state of Georgia by the Scottish naturalist, Hugh Falconer, in 1857. He originally named it Elephas columbi after Christopher Columbus.
It was one of the last of the mammoth species and evolved from the Steppes mammoth (M. trogontherii) who had crossed into North America about 1.5 mya. It lived during the Calabrian to the Tarantian of the Pleistocene, although it might have survived until the early Holocene.
The Columbian mammoth's ranged from the United States, through Mexico, to Costa Rica. Its habitat varied across this range, from grassland to woodlands. It shared this habitat with a variety of other animals, including Glyptodons, Smilodons, ground sloths, Camelops, horses, bison and mastodons.
Evolution:
The earliest known proboscideans (to which elephants belong) evolved ~55 mya in the Tethys Sea areas, while the elephantidae family evolved 6 mya in Africa.
This diagram shows how the Columbian mammoth is related to the other members of the elephantidae based on characteristics of the hyoid bone in the neck.
Social Behaviour:
The presence of musth glands on the side of mammoths' faces suggests that they had a similar social organisation and behaviour to that of modern elephants. Indeed, fossil evidence from the Waco Mammoth National Monument, Waco, Texas, has a number of females and young who died at the same time, which implies that they had a matriarchal herd structure, especially as two juveniles have been discovered held in the tusks of adult females, as if they were being carried. The Hot Springs Mammoth Site, South Dakota, has an accumulation of bones over a period of 300 to 700 years, almost all male, which implies that, like modern elephants, the males lived alone.
Diet:
After comparison to elephants, it is believed that an adult mammoth would need more than 180kgs of food a day, although due to a lack of stomach contents, what they ate is unknown. Plant remains found between the pelvis and ribs of the 'Huntington mammoth' show evidence of sedge, grass, fir twigs and needles, oak and maple. Also, a large amount of mammoth dung has been found in two Utah caves. The dry conditions and stable temperatures of Bechan Cave (bechan is Navajo for “large faeces”) has preserved 16000 to 13500 year old elephant dung, most probably from Columbian mammoths, consisting mostly of grass and sedge, with saltbush, sagebrush, water birch and blue spruce. This is similar to the diet of woolly mammoths, although browsing seems to have been more important to the Columbian. It has been suggested that the mammoths also consumed the giant fruit of the Osage-orange, Kentucky coffeetree and honey locust, as no other native herbivore could ingest them.
Extinction:
The Columbian mammoth became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene (~11,500 years ago), although fossils have been found beyond that date to 7800 years ago. There is a divide over whether extinction was due to climate change, hunting or a mixture of both.
The climate change hypothesis has warmer weather leading to shrinking habitat for the Columbian mammoth. The over hunting hypothesis, first proposed by Paul S Martin in 1967, attributes the extinction to hunting by humans. Research studies vary in their conclusions - a 2002 study concluded over hunting wasn't supported by the evidence, as only 14 out of 76 Clovis sites investigated showed strong evidence of hunting. However, a study in 2007 found that the Clovis record indicated the highest frequency of proboscideans for subsistence in the world and thus supported over hunting as the cause of extinction.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_mammoth
http://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/species/m/mammuthus-columbi-columbian-mammoth.html
http://dinopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Columbian_mammoth
http://eol.org/pages/4454743/details - Encyclopedia of life
Steppes mammoth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppe_mammoth