Welcome back to the curious tale of mammoths and mastodons! in our last issue we learned that human beings lived alongside these mighty prehistoric elephants for tens of thousands of years—and then forgot them entirely when they died out.
It took centuries for naturalists to piece together the fossil clues these animals left behind. When they did, it changed our understanding of the world. Mammoths and mastodons were the first fossil creatures ever to be reconstructed and understood for what they were: animals that lived during a previous prehistoric age and then vanished into extinction. What did this mean for the history of life? What scientific puzzles remained to be solved? and which mammoth myths and mysteries continue to this day?