This article was originally published on Sept. 6, 2022.
In 1873, the geologist Robert Stearns called attention to a single, fossilized tooth on the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. Despite being considerably small, it bore the distinct ridges of a mammoth tooth — which weren’t known to be among the island’s repertoire of fauna.
By 1928, enough fossils had been found throughout the Channel Islands to make Stearns’ discovery the first of an entirely new species: Mammuthus exilis, or the pygmy mammoth. It’s an apt name for an animal that was abnormally tiny (for a mammoth), standing on average 5 feet 6 inches tall at the shoulder and about 10 times lighter than the larger Columbian mammoths that plodded the mainland.
