Hyraxes

Woolly Mammoth DNA Reveals Elephant Family Tree. The extinct animals are more closely related to Asian rather than to African elephants. The DNA revealed that woolly mammoths had more genetic similarities to modern Asian elephants than to the African species, though not by much, Hofreiter’s team reports.

Mammoths and elephants are close cousins belonging to the same taxonomic family, the Elephantidae. Elephantids, as they’re called, also belong to the broader biological group Proboscidea: an order of otherwise extinct beasts, such as mastodons and deinotheres.

The mammoth was identified as an extinct species of elephant by Georges Cuvier in 1796. The woolly mammoth was roughly the same size as modern African elephants.

The Elephantidae. There are two living relatives of this group, the Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) and the larger African Savanna Elephant (Loxodonta africana). These two elephants are closely related to the extinct mammoths that once roamed the planet. See below for the evolutionary history of this group.

Some species of mammoth like the steppe mammoth and Columbian mammoth were much larger then the African elephant, and therefore most likely would’ve beat them in a fight. Wooly mammoths on the other hand are smaller then an African elephant and would likely lose in a fight.

The largest elephant ever recorded was shot in Angola in 1956. This male weighed about 24,000 lb (11,000 kg), with a shoulder height of 3.96 meters (13.0 ft), a metre (yard) taller than the average male African elephant.

One of the largest mammoths of its time, the Columbian mammoth stood up to 14 feet (over four meters) tall at the shoulder, 13 to 15 feet (4-4.5 meters) long, and possibly weighed- in at a massive 18,000 to 22,000 pounds (8,000-10,000 kilograms)! It also boasted large tusks up to 16 feet (almost five meters) long.