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 33 mastodon molars DHJanzen100695.jpg high resolution
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In accordance with their diet, mastodons (and the gomphothere in image DHJanzen100696.jpg above) had quite high-crowned molars, as evident in this mastodon skeleton from the La Brea tar pits. For such an animal, a grass diet is lethal because the silicon in the grass grinds off the molars at an unacceptably high rate. Incidentally, this skull is an excellent place to think about what a strange think are canine teeth evolved into tusks. Incidentally, La Brea means The Tar in Spanish, who coined the term for the pools of liquid tar that gobbled up and pickled such nice samples of Pleistocene megafauna (including pickling the gut contents so that we know what they ate). |
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