Donna Falls, age 11, of Gastonia, N.C., for her question:

What was the mastodon like?

The mammoth and the mastodon are by gone cousins of the Elephant, and we know of them only from their fossilized remains. There were at least 100 different mastodons, most of them shorter and more stocky than the modern Elephant. Their earliest fossils date back some 35 million years. These early mastodons had massive tusks in both their upper and lower jaws.

Later mastodons had tusks only in the upper or lower jaw. The shaggy monsters spread from Egypt to Asia and Africa, to Europe and America. But none survived the soggy period that followed the last ice age.