Conversation

Announcing a new species of Mastodon: Mammut pacificus, found on the west coast of the US! The holotype is Max the Mastodon of the Western Science Center in Hemet, CA, who is quite active on social media despite being extinct for thousands of years.

The paper and 3D specimen models are open access, and research was partly crowdfunded.

Invu with researchers: https://blogs.plos.org/paleocomm/2019/03/27/mastodon-surprise-an-interview-with-alton-dooley/

Paper: https://peerj.com/articles/6614/

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