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
Mastodon incognitum "mastodon". The name "mastodon" (or "mastodont") means "breast tooth" (Ancient Greek: μαστός "breast" and ὀδούς, "tooth"), and was assigned by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1817, for the nipple-like projections on the crowns of its molars. "Mastodon" as a genus name is obsolete; the valid name is "Mammut", a name that preceded Cuvier's description, making "Mastodon" a junior synonym. The change was met with resistance, and authors sometimes applied ""Mastodon"" as an informal name; consequently it became the common term for members of the genus. Species include: Since a tentative 1977 report of "M. matthewi" in China, there