Mammuthus

Mammuthus is the genus of extinct elephants known as mammoths. Its species lived from the late Miocene, from around 6.2 million years ago, into the Holocene, and the last woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago. At various times mammoths inhabited Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. They are set apart from living elephants by their typically large, spirally twisted tusks, and several later species developed adaptations to cold environments, including a thick layer of fur. Mammoths and Asian elephants are more closely related to each other than either is to African elephants. The oldest mammoth, Mammuthus subplanifrons, appeared in southern and eastern Africa, mammoths reached Eurasia by about three million years ago and crossed into North America around 1.5 million years ago, where they gave rise to the Columbian mammoth. The genus name was coined by the British anatomist Joshua Brookes in 1828.