How to Use mastodon in a Sentence

mastodon

noun
  • Ground sloths and mastodons are linked to forest habitats.
    — Hanna Wickes, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 29 Mar. 2026
  • There were moose and elk antlers and the upper jawbone of a mastodon.
    — Jon Meacham, House Beautiful, 1 Oct. 2013
  • Some from the early years of the mastodon's life and some from its final years.
    — Monica Cull, Discover Magazine, 13 June 2022
  • One of the stones features what appears to be a petroglyph of a mastodon.
    — Sean Kingsley, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 Mar. 2023
  • Two months later, a work crew uncovered a massive mastodon skull buried in the ground.
    — Steve Lord, Aurora Beacon-News, 3 Mar. 2018
  • Today the stately mastodon sits waiting for crowds to return.
    — Alicia Ault, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 May 2020
  • These are direct descendants of hunters who chased deer — and maybe mastodons and bison — across these hills.
    — Andrew Sharp, Outdoor Life, 27 Nov. 2024
  • Scientists now hope to find more fossils in the area, which could shed light on how and when the mastodons arrived.
    — Reuters, 29 Sep. 2024
  • This isn’t the first time the museum has encountered remains of a mastodon.
    — Vanessa Arredondo, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2023
  • But the Aucilla mastodons weren’t just sitting ducks for human hunters.
    — Jacob Mikanowski, The Atlantic, 19 Dec. 2017
  • The mastodon fossils looked very different from the other bones nearby.
    — Amina Khan, latimes.com, 26 Apr. 2017
  • Each anvil stone was surrounded by mastodon-bone fragments and flakes of stone, as if someone had been crushing bone on the anvil.
    — Traci Watson, USA TODAY, 26 Apr. 2017
  • For now, the researchers have identified the remains as belonging to an adult mastodon.
    — Margherita Bassi, Smithsonian Magazine, 19 Dec. 2024
  • During the Pleistocene, each of them lives the dream and single-handedly kills a mastodon.
    — William Von Hippel, Discover Magazine, 20 Feb. 2019
  • Other species recovered from the cave, including mastodons and ground sloths, are rare in the region.
    — Hanna Wickes, Miami Herald, 29 Mar. 2026
  • Then Jiminy Cricket pops up — yep — and another town is overrun with mastodons.
    — Ron Charles, Washington Post, 3 Sep. 2019
  • One problem in determining who exactly killed that mastodon rests on finding the bones of the group that did it.
    — John Wenz, Popular Mechanics, 26 Apr. 2017
  • In the next gallery are the familiar mastodon and Irish elk, as well as a display of human evolution.
    — Ed Stannard, Hartford Courant, 11 Mar. 2024
  • But the technique was not very reliable at the time, so the Cerutti mastodon remained an enigma.
    — Sarah Kaplan, chicagotribune.com, 26 Apr. 2017
  • Don’t miss the mastodon molar or the oil painting of Hylan Plaza (really).
    — New York Times, 28 Aug. 2019
  • Among them were the remains of dire wolves, camels, horses and gophers—but the most intriguing were those belonging to an adult male mastodon.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 26 Apr. 2017
  • These predators could grow up to six feet in length, and their large skull and jaws were adapted to take down Pleistocene megafauna such as mastodons and bison.
    — Andrea Thompson, Scientific American, 8 Apr. 2025
  • In November, crews found a 3-foot section of tusk from an adult mammoth; teeth of a mastodon; and a nearly intact skull of a young mammoth.
    — Danielle Hart, CNN, 18 July 2017
  • Defined by the long trunks and massive size, Proboscidea's ancestry include the mastodon of Ice Age fame.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 16 Oct. 2018
  • One big surprise was finding DNA from the mastodon, an extinct species that looks like a mix between an elephant and a mammoth, Kjær said.
    — Maddie Burakoff, Anchorage Daily News, 8 Dec. 2022
  • The mastodon's fossil was first found on a farm in 1998 by Kent and Janne Buesching, who were mining for peat on their property.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 13 June 2022
  • The place also showcased a famous mastodon, unearthed by the Peale family in upstate New York in the early 1800s.
    — Christina Tkacik, baltimoresun.com, 1 May 2017
  • The champagne-toevening-gowns mastodon, home to Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, among many others, had disclosed a stake of 17% and rising.
    — The Economist, 12 Sep. 2020
  • According to this theory, those now-extinct megafauna—the giant ground sloths and the giant beavers, the mastodons and mammoths, and even the lions and dire wolves—were relatively quickly hunted to extinction.
    — Literary Hub, 10 June 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'mastodon.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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