Wooly Mammoth During the last Ice Age, there were many large, interesting mammals, like the saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, woolly rhinos, mastodons, and mammoths. These animals have long since gone extinct and are known mostly from fossils, from frozen, mummified carcasses, and even from ancient cave drawings.
Mammoths lived from about 2 million years ago to 9,000 years ago, during the last ice age (the Pleistocene Epoch). This was millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct. These huge mammals lived throughout the world.
Modern-day Indian elephants are related to Woolly Mammoths.  Mammoths (genus Mammuthus) are extinct elephant-like animals that were adapted to cold weather. These herbivores (plant-eaters) had long, dense hair and underfur, large ears (but much smaller than modern-day elephants), a long proboscis (nose), and long tusks. Both the males and the females had tusks; the tusks were really incisor teeth. The various mammoths ranged in size from about 9 ft (2.7 m) tall to over 15 ft (4.5 m) tall. Some species had tusks that were straight, some had tusks that were curved. The longest tusks were over 17 feet (5.2 m) long. The tusks were used in mating rituals, for protection, and for digging in the snow for food.
Woolly mammoths roamed the northern plains for most of the last 2 million years or so, until just 10,000 years ago. A subject of controversy for many years, it is generally agreed now that mammoths died out from a combination of changing climate, hunting pressure from humans, and probably disease. Most of the 100 or so mammoths found to date appear to have gotten trapped and died in swamps or soft soil, or to have been buried by avalanches. Remains of the mammoths have been discovered across northern Europe, Siberia and into Alaska and Canada. Usually these rare finds are the bones, teeth and tusks. Very rarely in northern Siberia a mammoth is uncovered, usually by erosion, in the permafrost areas that includes preserved hair. Both the long coarse guard hair and the soft under-wool have been found. See Also: Ammonite, Chondrichthyians (Shark Tooth) or Trilobites
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