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 (software) Mastodon (software) Mastodon is a distributed, federated social network that forms part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter. Each user is a member of a specific Mastodon server, known as an "instance" of the software, but can connect and communicate with users on other instances as well. Users post short messages called "toots" for others to see, subject to the adjustable privacy settings of the user and their particular instance. The Mastodon mascot is a brown or grey Proboscidean sometimes depicted using a tablet or smartphone. The