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Mastodon   Listen
noun
Mastodon  n.  (Paleon.) An extinct genus of mammals closely allied to the elephant, but having less complex molar teeth, and often a pair of lower, as well as upper, tusks, which are incisor teeth. The species were mostly larger than elephants, and their remains occur in nearly all parts of the world in deposits ranging from Miocene to late Quaternary time.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mastodon" Quotes from Famous Books



... per acre.[32] Single Alvarado seeds were sold at fifty cents each, or a bushel might be had at $160. In the succeeding years Vick's Hundred Seed, Brown's, Pitt's, Prolific, Sugar Loaf, Guatemala, Cluster, Hogan's, Banana, Pomegranate, Dean, Multibolus, Mammoth, Mastodon and many others competed for attention and sale. Some proved worth while either in increasing the yield, or in producing larger bolls and thereby speeding the harvest, or in reducing the proportionate weight of the seed and increasing that of the lint; but the test of planting ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... man.' It was a saying of some great French religious teacher. But surely this is false. God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal creative mystery could ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... never been out of London, but when he takes a holiday spends it in hanging about Tweedy's, and observing that unlovely place of business from the outside. The dust, if not the iron, of Tweedy's has entered into his soul; and Tweedy's young men know him as "the Mastodon." He is a thin, bald septuagenarian, with sloping shoulders, and a habit of regarding the pavement when he walks, so that he seems to steer his way by instinct rather than sight. In general he keeps silence while eating his chop; and on this occasion there ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... call to embark in a "radical reform" crusade. They know that society is an organism, not a machine, and that it cannot be violently transformed, any more than a man can be changed into a demigod, or a monkey into a mastodon. They realize that the "old order changeth, yielding place to new"; but they also realize that the change must be slow in order to be healthy. Nearly every change that the world has witnessed has been slowly, almost ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... of South America, is shown by the facility with which they have there run wild and enormously multiplied, since introduced from the Old World not long ago. There was no wild American stock. Yet in the times of the mastodon and megatherium, at the dawn of the present period, wild-horses—certainly very much like the existing horse—roamed over those plains in abundance. On the principle of original and direct created adaptation of species to climate and other conditions, why were they not ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... years earlier—an "infernal comedy of the sixteenth century"—is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and genius; it bears to Hugo's Legende des Siecles the relation which the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... with ax and arrow the wilderness of the Blue Ridge teemed with wild animal life. The bones of mastodon and mammoth remained to attest their supremacy over an uninhabited land thousands upon thousands of years ago. Then, following the prehistoric and glacial period, more recent fauna—buffalo, elk, deer, bear, and wolf—made paths through the forest from salt lick ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... in a flash of light, I saw great Nature working out her plan; Through all her shapes, from mastodon to mite, Forever groping, testing, passing on To find at last the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... Icelandic discoverers of America. Mr. Kipling, however, has taken the wind out of its sails with his sketch, "The Finest Story in the World." There are all the marvels and portents of the Eyrbyggja Saga to draw upon, there are Skraelings to fight, and why should not Karlsefni's son kill the last mastodon, and, as Quetzalcoatl, be the white-bearded god of the Aztecs? After that a romance on the intrigues to make Charles Edward King of Poland sounds commonplace. But much might be made of that, too, if the right man took it in ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... of hoofed mammals, of which the elephant is the sole survivor, began, so far as known, in the Eocene, in Egypt, with a piglike ancestor the size of a small horse, with cheek teeth like the Mastodon's, but wanting both trunk and tusks. A proboscidian came next with four short tusks, and in the Miocene there followed a Mastodon (Fig. 346) armed with two pairs of long, straight tusks on which rested a ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... little more to say of St. Louis, as the museum was the only public building we visited. The great curiosity there is the largest known specimen of the mastodon. It is almost entire from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, and measures ninety-six feet in length. We left St. Louis, and were glad to escape for a time at least out of a slave state. The "institution" was brought more prominently ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... becoming that of one who is gathering facts of the most solemn import. I am positive that he would have taken with a poor grace the slightest levity from even myself on the subject of Hili-li. But from the bell-boy of a hotel! Olympus to become a pasture field for mastodon cows! Its ice and its saline wonders to be employed in the making ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... lived at the same time, and, according to a discovery made some thirty years ago at Denise in Middle France, probably even man and another older and defunct form of pachydermata, the elephas meridionalis, in North America man and the mastodon. The reader may compare the discoveries regarding the age of mankind, as they are described most recently by Sir Charles Lyell in his work upon this subject, in the publications of the Anthropological Congress at Brussels in the year 1873, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... individual has a definite length of life, so have species a definite duration. No one can have marvelled more than I have done at the extinction of species. When I found in La Plata the tooth of a horse embedded with the remains of Mastodon, Megatherium, Toxodon and other extinct monsters, which all co-existed with still living shells at a very late geological period, I was filled with astonishment; for, seeing that the horse, since its introduction by the Spaniards into South America, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... the Alcaldia to the Ministry and called upon a Guipuzcoan politician, as my father had previously advised me to do; but the man was a political mastodon, puffed up with huge pretensions, who, perhaps, might have been a stevedore in any other country. So he did nothing. Finally, it occurred to me to go and see the Conde de Romanones, who had just been appointed Alcalde ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... Russia. Unfortunately the receding glaciers carried off the top-soil, which accounts for the barrenness of the district, but in another century this country will be overgrown with ferns, and inhabited by the mastodon and wild horse, and a few enterprising palaeolithic hunters, who will come in to track them down and destroy ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... stealthy terror of the sinuous pard, The lion maned with curl-ed puissance, The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin, Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin; And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat'st. Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon, And many a floating bank of fangs, The scaly scourges of thy primal brine, And the tower-crested plesiosaure. Thou fill'st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow On purple aeons of kings; man's hulking towers Are carcase ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... chance of your not doing so, I send the enclosed rich letter. (81/1. See the "Times," December 1st and December 5th, 1859: two letters signed "Senex," dealing with "Works of Art in the Drift.") It is, I am sure, by Fitz-Roy...It is a pity he did not add his theory of the extinction of Mastodon, etc., from the door of the Ark being made too small. (81/2. A postscript to this letter, here omitted, is published in the "Life and Letters," II., ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... the footprints were monstrous. The great hoofs had crushed down through the snow, and had even bitten into the earth. Will had a curious idea that it might not be a mountain buffalo, large as they grew, but some primordial beast, a survivor of a prehistoric time, a mammoth or mastodon, the pictures of which he recalled in his youthful geography. If America itself had so long passed unknown to the white man, why could not these vast animals also be still living, hidden in the secluded valleys of ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... the war, or rather the new American spirit that issued from the war, which finally assured these poets and critics that mythology and legend were, so far as America was concerned, as dead as the mastodon, and that life itself was the only vitally interesting subject of poetry. Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), after writing many "finished" poems that were praised and forgotten, manfully acknowledged ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... intend to let mere hunger conflict with our desire for exploration," was Emma Dean's firm reminder. "Given a chance, we may find something wonderful. We may dig the prehistoric mastodon from some snug corner where he burrowed several thousand ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... Ptush to our wild districts in search of a fresh hunting-ground for himself and his son, Prince Ptutt, brought about a very serious condition of affairs in respect to the mastodon, or what some persons refer to as the Antediluvians. This most distinguished personage, wearying of the affairs of state in his own land, gave over the reins of government for a while to his Grand Vizier, ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... ended. The man had conquered. The ant had control over the mastodon; the pygmy had taken ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various



Words linked to "Mastodon" :   genus Mammut, American mastodon, Mammut, proboscidean, proboscidian, Mammut americanum, genus Mastodon, American mastodont, mastodont



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