Mastodons

Mastodons are considered to have had a predominantly browsing-based diet on leaves, fruits, and woody parts of plants. This allowed mastodons to niche partition with other members of Proboscidea in North America, like gomphotheres and the Columbian mammoth, who had shifted to mixed feeding or grazing by the late Neogene-Quaternary. It is thought that mastodon behaviors were not much different from that of elephants and mammoths, with females and juveniles living in herds and adult males living largely solitary lives plus entering phases of aggression similar to the musth exhibited by modern male elephants. Mammut achieved maximum species diversity in the Pliocene, though the genus is known from abundant fossil evidence in the Late Pleistocene.