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The mystery of the mastodons gets a few big clues

Ever since Europeans first uncovered mastodon fossils along Big Bone Lick in Kentucky in 1739, the demise of these huge animals and other lumbering contemporaries at the end of the last ice age has been an enduring puzzle to paleontologists. Now, a team of researchers has evidence that woolly mammoths, huge ground sloths, and other Pleistocene giants became extinct earlier than previously thought.