Examination of fossilized tusks revealed a series of regularly spaced shallow pits on the underside of the tusks. The tusks were probably used to break branches and twigs although some evidence suggests males may have used them in mating challenges one tusk is often shorter than the other, suggesting that, like humans, mastodons may have had laterality. Young males had vestigial lower tusks that were lost in adulthood. The tusks of the mastodon sometimes exceeded five meters in length, and were nearly horizontal, another contrast with more strongly curved mammoth tusks. Mastodons also seem to have lacked the undercoat characteristic of mammoths. Their skulls were larger and flatter than those of mammoths, while their skeleton was stockier and more robust. They differed from mammoths primarily in the blunt, conical shape of their teeth, which were more suited to chewing leaves than the high-crowned teeth mammoths used for grazing the name mastodon (or mastodont) means mastoid teeth (Greek μαστός and οδούς "nipple tooth"), and is also an obsolete name for their genus. While mastodons were furry like woolly mammoths, and similar in height at roughly three meters at the shoulder, the resemblance was superficial. There have been, however, findings of mastodon fossils in South America and also on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. Their remains have been found as far as 300 kilometers offshore in Northeastern United States, in areas that were dry land during the low sea level stand of the last ice age. Though their habitat spanned a large territory, mastodons were most common in the Ice age spruce forests of Eastern United States, as well as in warmer lowland environments. Mastodons first appeared almost four million years ago and became extinct about 10,000 years ago, at the same time as most other Pleistocene megafauna. The American mastodon ( Mammut americanum) lived in North America.
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