I must have over indulged in the rich food over the holidays. I had strange dreams which included meeting some creatures that don’t exist anymore. One dream included mastodons, which lived around 15-30,000 years ago. I thought it was an elephant at first, and then realized that they had heavy coats of hair and smaller ears than elephants. They lived in North and Central America during a time the earth was much colder than it is today.

Unlike elephants and mammoths, mastodons didn’t graze on grass but browsed on trees and bushes. As the earth warmed and people migrated to new lands both mastodons and mammoths disappeared. They were hunted for their meat, skin and bones and much of what they ate died out due to the weather changing.

Scientists learned a lot about them from looking at old skeletons found in the last couple of centuries. They were big animals, standing 7-9 feet tall and weighed 7-12 tons, about the same as two cars piled on top of each other. In my dream I made sure to stay out from underfoot, or I would have been squashed like a bug! Purrs, Gulliver