Alison McBratney, age 10, of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, for her question:

Why did the woolly mastodon vanish from the earth?

The last of the mastodons perished from the earth about 8,000 years ago    but nobody really knows why they became extinct. They roamed around North America when the last ice age glaciers crept down from the north. The American Indians knew about them and may have hunted them. But mastodons were whopping giants and certainly the Indians could not have wiped them out.

The long lost mastodon was related to the modern elephant. He was not quite as big as an elephant, but his body was thicker and sturdier. He had huge curving tusks and he wore a woolly coat. He was quite at home in the cold weather that came with the ice age. But when the ice melted and the weather grew warmer, his relatives departed one by one. Nobody knows for sure why all the mastodons were wiped out. But maybe, just maybe, they could not cope with long spells of summery weather.