Mammoth construction of the Great Pyramid of ancient Egypt. The earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes. The family Elephantidae is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes the living elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved. The following cladogram shows the placement
Mastodon (band) Blackdiamondskye, a portmanteau of the three bands' latest albums ("Black Gives Way to Blue", "Diamond Eyes", and "Crack the Skye"). Film director Jimmy Hayward contacted the band during their 2009 tour of Europe and expressed how much listening to "Blood Mountain" had helped his creative process while finishing a screenplay, and he offered Mastodon a chance to score the film he had been working on - "Jonah Hex". In an interview with "Paste" magazine, bassist Troy Sanders said that Hayward "called us out of the blue as a fan. It was the most beautiful, authentic way to collaborate." Mastodon used