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
Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels was a blackface minstrel troupe created in 1877, when J. H. Haverly merged four of the companies he owned and managed. Borrowing techniques from showmen like P. T. Barnum, Haverly advertised the Mastodons in broadsides, newspapers, and playbills: "FORTY—COUNT 'EM—40—FORTY—HAVERLY'S UNITED MASTODON MINSTRELS". Another ad read, "Forty is a magical and historical number. In the time of Noah it rained forty days and forty nights. The Children of Israel wandered forty years in the wilderness. Haverly's famous forty are just as important." The Mastodons entered every new town in two columns, spread