Today, for no real reason, let’s look at some fun facts about the majestic Mastodon, one of my very favorite proboscideans.
- Mastodons lived from as many as 23 million years ago until about 10,500 years ago, when they went extinct due to rapid climate change and overhunting.
- The elephant-like mammals were shorter than both elephants and mammoths but very sturdily built, with short but powerful legs.
- They lived in forests and seem to have eaten mostly leaves and twigs.
- Male mastodons had short lower tusks along with their much longer upper tusks.
- Though often depicted with long, thick fur like the wooly mammoth, they may not actually have been furry. Wikipedia says there’s no evidence this was the case.
- Officially, mastodons are known as “mammuts,” though people have been reluctant to use that term and most use “mastodon” instead.
- It’s not clear where most species of mastodons lived because we don’t have evidence. However, Wikipedia notes, “the American mastodon (M. americanum) [was] one of the most widely distributed Pleistocene proboscideans in North America,” ranging from Alaska to as far south as Florida.
- Mastodon is also the name of an American heavy metal band.
- Mastodon is also also the name of a decentralized social media network. You can sign up for it yourself at JoinMastodon.org. Because Mastodon is decentralized and “federated,” you will need to sign up on a specific server, or instance. (People on specific instances can follow and see posts from people on other instances.) If this seems confusing, or you can’t decide which server to sign up with, you could always try established instances like Mastodon.lol or mstdn.social. You can easily change servers later if you are so inclined.
- Twitter has just banned links to Mastadon and other social networks; it has also prohibited people from even mentioning their Mastodon IDs. Because some of the useful tools that allow you to quickly find and follow the Mastodon accounts of people you follow on Twitter depend on people being allowed to mention Mastodon in their Twitter profiles, you might want to consider signing up for Mastadon very soon, like RIGHT NOW TODAY RIGHT THIS MINUTE before these tools are rendered useless. That might be the whole reason I wrote this post.
- I’ve removed my Mastodon ID from my Twitter profile, so if someone were interested in following me on Mastodon, they would need to go directly to my account on Mastodon.social.
This concludes today’s episode of Mastodon Facts.
Follow me on Mastodon.
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With luck this new rule won’t last long- the head of France’s cybercrime division just pointed out that enforcing that rule makes Twitter an editorial platform and therefore makes them liable for all illegal content on it. And I’d wager there’s going to be a lot of illegal content on the site that Musk is going to have to take responsibility for now.
I was always a bit fuzzy (no pun intended, but keeping it) on the difference between mastodons and mammoths. Even after seeing the ones at La Brea. So now I know.
In return I offer Bob Newhart vs. a mastodon.
I was inspired to learn more of the mastodon-related trivia on Wikipedia. It seems there’s some major potential for terminological confusion, which needs to be cleared out. Some of the following is my own interpretation of what likely happened with the naming history.
Mastodons are only quite distantly related to elephants and mammoths – they diverged nearly 30 million years ago. For comparison, the modern African elephant, Indian elephant and the recently extinct mammoth lineage diverged from each other around five million years ago. The name mastodon properly refers to the genus Mammut, but colloquially it is sometimes used for other members of the family Mammutidae (properly “mammutids”), and even other extinct proboscideans outside the family Elephantidae (which includes elephants and mammoths).
The name mammoth derives, via Russian, likely from some Siberian indigenous language, as subfossil mammoth bones are abundant in that area. First mastodon bones were described from North America in the 18th century. By the late 18th century, European naturalists used the name “mammoth” (Latin mammut, mammuthus) for any mysterious “elephant” remains found far outside the modern elephant ranges. In 1792, Rober Kerr gave the name Elephas americanus for the US remains, placing them in the same genus with Indian elephant.
In 1799, Johann Blumenbach gave scientific names for different types of “mammoths”, after Georges Cuvier had noted that they were different from modern elephants and from each other. The American species was named Mammut americanus, making it a “true mammoth”. The Siberian mammoth meanwhile was named Elephas primigenius, probably because Blumenbach recognized it was more similar to elephants.
However, the genus Mammut was apparently not accepted by Cuvier himself, who later (1817) gave the genus name Mastodon for the American species. This was later deemed invalid by taxonomists, due to the precedence of Mammut. However, “mastodon” became a widely used popular name, probably in part to avoid further confusion with mammoths, since that name was always primarily associated with the Siberian species (and other, closely related species that were later identified elsewhere). In 1828, the real “true mammoths” were moved from Elephas to their own genus, which was named Mammuthus, as opposed to Mammut.
Fun fact about dire wolves: Despite the near-identical skeletal structure, they’re not at all wolves. DNA analysis (based on the 20% which has been recovered) suggests that their closest living relatives are jackals. But they’re probably not jackals either, but part of another branch of the canine family entirely.
Extra fun fact:
Originally, mastodon fossils were misinterpreted as it being carnivorous, attacking by pouncing. And, as George Cuvier’s theory of extinction was pretty new at the time and Thomas Jefferson only come to accept this dark truth after leaving office, it was believed to still be roaming some yet-unexplored (by Europeans) part of America and Lewis & Clark were, among other things, supposed to look for them.
@Anonymous:
“And I’d wager there’s going to be a lot of illegal content on the site that Musk is going to have to take responsibility for now.”
Especially given how shorthanded his incompetent antics have left the crews who used to exist specifically to remove said illegal content.
Not to mention all the fascists who have been flying their favorite symbols from German history lately. Which, if Twitter wants to be treated like a publisher, means they’re going to get hit HARD by the German legal system, for every single instance.
FYI:
I am at @[email protected] and my kitties can be found from @[email protected]
@GSS
The tar pits are amazing! I recommend them to everyone who visits the area as one of the most unique and fascinating places here.
@ Everyone on Mastodon, which ‘instance’ do you think is best for me to join? I’m autistic, non-binary, a writer and book blogger, I crochet and embroider, and collect dragons. I don’t want to go anywhere I’d feel unsafe.
@BTD:
Just watch out for volcanoes, “silent but deadly” nerve-gas bubbles, and timewarps, mkay? 🙂
Also, mastodons were browsers, eating trees and bushes like moose while mammoths were grazers like cattle.
I know a number of people who use sites like carrd.co as one-stop link aggregators for links to all their social media sites and such; while even the free accounts on the site can be a little more general than that, I think that’s one of the standard templates.
If Musk really wants to ban links to Mastodon, he’s going to have to look at banning links to any outside sites that may then contain links to Mastodon. That’s assuming he or his remaining flunkies have thought that far ahead, which they probably haven’t.
A number of people have been quoting the Business Insider article Elon’s stale playbook recently:
I don’t know that Musk is psychologically capable of admitting that he was wrong and that he needs to rethink his management style. At Tesla and SpaceX where he was dealing with real domain experts working for him, and with real physical objects that took time to build and had safety regulations that had to be followed, there were already people who deliberately worked on what would actually work rather than what Musk ordered. (There were apparently people building a small radar team inside Tesla despite Musk’s insistence that their self-driving cars would be optical only, because they knew the tech wasn’t ready for that, and no surprise it wasn’t). But Twitter can be endlessly tweaked and easily broken on a whim, and he’s already fired pretty much everybody who would have been in a position to work around him.
@RJ Dragon
I like the guide https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon#how-do-i-pick-an-instance
for getting started. I’m [email protected]. I follow [email protected] and [email protected].
Mastodon has always had a lot of LGBTQIA people and a lot of just regular people running servers. I love my small local server! I also follow enough people to have a busy Home feed, since there’s no algorithm.
Mastodon-adjacent fact: wooly mammoths were still alive after the great pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge were built.
So, anyone with a beard out there have any products that would be good for grooming them? I’m trying to figure out a Christmas present for my husband. He has sensitive skin
@ halloween jack
There were mammoths in 1930?
(Silly archaeological conspiracy theory)
Radar has inherent advantages over optical, no matter how smart the brain (whether artificial or human) behind the wheel is.
Most notably, a self-driving radar car ought to be able to completely ignore pea-soup fog and other zero-visibility conditions. The radar will still see the back of the next car ahead and any radar-reflective lane markings and suchlike, and a decent map package plus GPS will let it know the local speed limit and not miss its exit even though it still can’t read the roadside signs (they’ll likely show up in radar, but as blank geometric shapes). Of course, it will have the misfortune sooner or later to end up stuck behind a manual and/or optical-only car that is forced to stop … unless such have the courtesy to pull over when the visibility gets that bad, so the cars without such limitations can pass them and carry on.
A downside is that radar might be susceptible to denial of service attacks by miscreants with jamming equipment. Sabotaging all the self-driving cars on a stretch of highway would be a recipe for, at best, a serious traffic snarl, if not a pileup. Think of the chaos those asshole convoy truckers could unleash 10 or so years further down the line …
I’ve just got back from seeing my mum. A round trip of 900 miles (which I appreciate for our USian friends is like popping down the shops). It was a nightmare journey up north. I was doing my Torville & Dean impersonation all the way along the Fosse Way*. And it was patchy fog too. So I am a BIG fan of radar. There was lots of people having to brake suddenly, and also lots of lane switching. So it’s very reassuring that someone else is taking care of all the braking. My truck is a better driver than me anyway.
(* A normal person would have gone up the M5; but if it was good enough for the Romans…)
But anyway, as to Teslas and machine learning….
@Skiriki: I love your kitties’ names and OMG, #Cats of Mastodon?!
I am gonna have to do more with my account after the holidays.
If you find yourself thinking “I am not joining Mastodon because I don’t know what Mastodon Service Provider/Instance/Server to join,” then instances don’t actually do as much as you think they do. Pick any of the big ones and you’ll be fine.
You can follow me at mstdn.social/@183231bcb
@do I have a name
Thanks.
Lots of them don’t seem to be accepting new users, and none of them provide any way to view their terms and conditions without enabling JS.
Sorry, bub, but I want to know enough to pick one of you to commit to before letting any of you run code on my machine!
No mention of John Mastodon, founder of the eponymous social media network?
@Alan: I am notoriously terrible at parking (even head-on in a lot), but I could have done a better job than that Tesla did. Even without a backup camera.