Mastodons in Musth: Tusks may chronicle battles between males
By Sid Perkins
Damaged segments on fossils of male mastodons’ tusks hint that the creatures engaged in fierce combat with each other during a specific time almost every year of their adult lives, a new study suggests. That behavior parallels the annual period of heightened aggression and hormone-fueled jousting for mates in modern bull elephants. Scientists call the yearly period musth.
“American mastodons were not just docile herbivores that whiled away their time in forests and meadows,” says Daniel C. Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “They were very aggressive animals.”