The last ones died off after the internal combustion engine was invented
The last ones died off after the internal combustion engine was invented
—
What? You must be making some sort of joke.
Author Louis L'Amour has Jubal Sackett encounter a mammoth/mastodon in the eponymous novel, which is set during the time of Charles I. I read an interview where L'Amour was asked to justify the encounter. He related a story about a small group of English sailors who were marooned in southern Mexico during the reign of Elizabeth I. Under Spanish law they were not just foreign pirates, but heretics, and several of them decided they would not wait two or three years, hoping word would reach England, and a rescue expedition be sent.
So they set out walking for the nearest place they might plausibly meet up with other Englishmen. Nova Scotia.
L'Amour stated that number of years later at least one of them made it to Nova Scotia, contacted English fishermen catching and salting cod, and at last returned to England. In recounting his trek from Mexico to Nova Scotia, he described the animals he had seen, and heard of. One he had only heard of, which he was told was then quite rare, was clearly a mastodon/mammoth. L'Amour pointed out that this was more than 200 years before the woolly mammoth was known to science, so there was no possibility that the sailor was attempting to embellish his tale by describing a known, but extinct, animal.