Mastodon largest male specimens, the 35-year-old AMNH 9950 was tall and weighed , while another was tall and weighed . Like modern elephants, the females were smaller than the males. They had a low and long skull with long curved tusks, with those of the males being more massive and more strongly curved. Mastodons had cusp-shaped teeth, very different from mammoth and elephant teeth (which have a series of enamel plates), well-suited for chewing leaves and branches of trees and shrubs. Based on the characteristics of mastodon bone sites, it can be inferred that, as in modern proboscideans, the mastodon social
Early history of fantasy a staple of modern fantasy. The "Baital Pachisi" ("Vikram and the Vampire") is a collection of various fantasy tales set within a frame story about an encounter between King Vikramāditya and a Vetala, an early mythical creature resembling a vampire. According to Richard Francis Burton and Isabel Burton, the "Baital Pachisi" "is the germ which culminated in the "Arabian Nights", and which inspired the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius, Boccacio's "Decamerone," the "Pentamerone," and all that class of facetious fictitious literature." Classical mythology is replete with fantastical stories and characters, the best known (and perhaps the most relevant to modern fantasy)