Dwarf mammoth
| Dwarf mammoth | ||||||||||||
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Mammuthus exilis fossil |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Middle and Young Pleistocene | ||||||||||||
| 126,000 to 11,000 years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Mammuthus exilis | ||||||||||||
| ( Stock & Furlong , 1928) | ||||||||||||
The dwarf mammoth ( Mammuthus exilis ) is an extinct species from the elephant family .
It lived about 30,000 to 12,000 years ago on the Channel Islands of California and shows forms of island dwarfing , similar to the island gray fox that still occurs there today . The dwarf mammoth only reached a shoulder height of 1.20 to 1.80 meters, while the species of the genus Mammuthus related to it were almost twice as large. The dwarf mammoth, which weighs up to 1,000 kilograms, was particularly closely related to the prairie mammoth ( Mammuthus columbi ), which could weigh up to 10,000 kilograms.
Such island dwarfing was a widespread phenomenon among elephant-like species, as their good swimming ability enabled them to colonize even isolated islands. This is how dwarf mammoths developed on the Siberian island of Wrangel and survived there until around 4,000 years ago. Also on the Mediterranean islands there were originally a number of endemic dwarf elephants , including the Crete dwarf mammoth and Mammuthus lamarmorai in Sardinia or the Sicilian dwarf elephant , as well as some island dwarf forms of the stegodons are known on some Indonesian islands such as Komodo or Flores . The reasons for the dwarfing of the islands here were the lack of food and the lack of predators.
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- The Paleobiology Database Mammuthus exilis
- National Park Service. Channel Islands National Park. The Pygmy Mammoth