Type of Animal: Mammal. Animal Family: Elephantidae. Fossils Found: Asia, Europe and North America. Time period: Pleistocene to Early Holocene: 150,000 to 4,000 years ago. Shoulder Height Male: 2.7 to 3.4 m (8.9 to 11.2 ft.); Female: 2.6 to 2.9 m (8.5 to 9.5 ft.) Weight Male: Up to 6,000 kg (6.6 tons); Female: up to 4,000 kg (4.4 tons)
A male woolly mammoth’s shoulder height was 9 to 11 feet tall and weighed around 6 tons. Its cousin the Steppe mammoth ( M. trogontherii ) was perhaps the largest one in the family — growing up to 13 to 15 feet tall.
Besides their long, shaggy coats, woolly mammoths are famous for their extra-long tusks, which measured up to 15 feet on the biggest males. These huge appendages were most likely a sexually selected characteristic: males with longer, curvier, more impressive tusks had the opportunity to pair up with more females during mating season.
Most mammoths were about as large as modern elephants. The North American imperial mammoth (M. imperator) attained a shoulder height of 4 metres (14 feet). At the other extreme were certain dwarfed forms whose ancestors became isolated on various islands.
The woolly mammoth was roughly the same size as the modern day African elephant, reaching up to 11 feet tall. They lived during the Pleistocene until the early Holocene. The woolly mammoth diverged from the steppe mammoth about 800,000 years ago in East Asia.
Woolly mammoths stood about 3 to 3.7 metres (about 10 to 12 feet) tall and weighed between 5,500 and 7,300 kg (between about 6 and 8 tons). They had a yellowish brown undercoat about 2.5 cm (about 1 inch) thick beneath a coarser outer covering of dark brown hair that grew more than 70 cm (27.5 inches) long in some individuals.
Woolly mammoths were probably about the size of African elephants, around 13 feet tall. But woolly mammoths had much smaller ears, which kept them from losing body heat. They were also...
Contrary to popular belief, the woolly mammoths were not really ‘giants’ by appearance, but roughly the same size as modern African elephants, standing at the height of up to 12 feet at the shoulder and weighing around 12 tons.