Mammoths

Three species of mammoths (genus Mammuthus) lived on the mainland of the United States at the end of the last Ice Age. These were the Columbian mammoth (M. columbi), Jefferson's mammoth (M. jeffersonii), and the woolly mammoth (M. primigenius). Of these, not only Jefferson's mammoth but also the woolly mammoth has been known from the midwestern U.S.
Mammoths, mastodons and modern elephants, are members of the order Proboscidea. The mammoths are directly associated to the breathing elephants, especially to the Asiatic elephant (Elephas maximus).
As adults these late-occuring mammoths stood between about 3 and 3.7 meters (10-12 feet) at the shoulder and weighed between 5500 and 7300 kilograms (6-8 tons).

Mammoth Teeth

The teeth of mammoths are quite individual. They are collected of a set of condensed enamel plates that are detained together with cemented. These cemented plates make a very tall, strong, and wear-resistant tooth. After a tooth erupts from the gum crack, the mammoth uses it in grinding coarse vegetation like grass. This use causes the tooth to build up a flat top with low enamel ridges where the plates have been damaged.
The tall structure of these hypsodont (shallow-rooted) teeth make them very unwilling to wear. This is important because mammoths are thought to have been chiefly grass-eaters. Grass is a very hard textile to eat. It has small pieces of silica (a glass-like substance) in its leaves. These pieces of silica act like sandpaper grit and would wear away a less opposed to tooth very hurriedly.
Mammoths are recurrently found as fossils in the midwestern U.S. Most often lonely teeth are found. Mammoth fossils are most common in areas that were enclosed by savannas, grasslands, or tundra all through the last Ice Age. This map shows some of the significant mammoth finds in the region.
Regarding 1.5 to 1.8 million years ago the first mammoths entered North America. These mammoths came from Eurasia, crossing the Bering Strait at a time when sea level was lower than today. The first mammoths from Eurasia belonged to a species called M. meridionalis. The descendants of this species of mammoth integrated both the Columbian and Jefferson's mammoths. The woolly mammoths evolved in Eurasia and came over the Bering Strait much later (perhaps less than 500,000 years ago). Roughly 11,000 years ago all species of mammoths went extinct in North America.
Find out more about this extinction.
Although only bone and teeth of mammoths are sealed in the Midwestern U.S., the Illinois State Museum also has a sample of mammoth hair from Siberia.
This photograph shows a sample of hair from the Yuribei Mammoth. The Yuribei Mammoth was institute along the Yuribei River on the Gyda Peninsula, NW Siberia, Russia. It is a young adult, feminine mammoth. She was roofed with a long and thick, brownish hair coat, an example of which is shown above. Radiocarbon dating indicates that she lived about 11,000 years ago.
The Yuribei Mammoth was composed in 1979 by a multidisciplinary team in place of three institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The hair sample revealed here was accessible to the Illinois State Museum in 1991 by Dr. Gennady Baryshnikov, of the History of Faunas Department of the Zoological Insitute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.