“Mastodons and mammoths once lived throughout North America and part of South America. They are unquestionably elephants in the eyes of zoologists. The question is how late they lived. Most experts assume they failed to survive down to the time of the Jaredites. The only place they are mentioned in the Book of Mormon is in the Book of Ether, near the beginning of that record (by my calculations of Jaredite chronology, the date must have been before 2500 B.C.). Experts agree that the mammoth and mastodon could have survived in favored spots much later than the time normally assigned for their extinction” (Sorensen, Ancient American Setting, 297).