[cmrdporcupine]

:-)

Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think) climate creature.

Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is like this.

I would have loved to have met one.

Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone build an analogy from that? :-)