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
Call of the Mastodon On the documentary of the making of "Crack the Skye", the band stated that "Call of the Mastodon" is their FIRST studio album, (Brent lists it first before Remission, Leviathan, Blood Mountain). He doesn't mention anything about it being their third album. He just says "Crack The Skye" is their fifth album *IF* you count "Call of The Mastodon" as their first. This sentiment was also echoed by Bill Kelliher when he appeared on Loudwire's 'Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction'. A live version of "Where Strides the Behemoth" is featured as a bonus track on the Japanese release of the album,