American mastodons were not mammoths, though they are often conflated in popular imagination.

They were a distinct species — Mammut americanum — that had been present in North America for millions of years before the end-Pleistocene extinctions that claimed them.

They were somewhat smaller than the largest mammoths, with a different body profile: lower-slung, more heavily built, with straighter tusks.

They were browsers rather than grazers, feeding on the woody vegetation of forest edges and wetland margins rather than the open grasslands preferred by woolly mammoths.

The mastodon that would eventually become known as the Manis Mastodon died near a small lake or wetland on the northern Olympic Peninsula — a depression in the landscape that would, over the following millennia, accumulate sediment and organic material, eventually becoming the wet environment that a man named Emanuel Manis would drain and develop as a small farm in the twentieth century.