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
Extinct language may be considered "extinct", especially in cases where they did not leave a corpus of literature or liturgy that remained in widespread use (see corpus language), as is the case with e.g. Old English or Old High German relative to their contemporary descendants, English and German. Some degree of misunderstanding can result from designating languages such as Old English and Old High German as extinct, or Latin dead, while ignoring their evolution as a language. This is expressed in the apparent paradox "Latin is a dead language, but Latin never died." A language such as Etruscan, for example, can be