A full-size replica of the skeleton of a male Columbian mammoth recalls the mammoths that once lived on the Camas Prairie. Related to modern Asian elephants, male mammoths stood up to 14 feet tall at the shoulders and may have weighed 10 tons, while females were somewhat smaller. The prairie’s grasses, herbs, and woody vegetation helped support them, and like elephants today, mammoths used their trunks to gather nearly 700 pounds of such food each day. When mammoths lived here, the landscape would have looked much like the present prairie, with short grass and occasional pine, spruce, and fir on the foothills, but with mammoth groups grazing and prehistoric bison drinking from Three Mile Creek. Mammoths entered North America about 1.5 million years ago, and Columbian mammoths survived until about 12,000 years ago, though it is not known exactly how long ago mammoths lived on the Camas Prairie or when they died in Tolo Lake. No evidence has been found that humans killed or ate these animals, although Nez Perce Indian oral tradition includes stories of hunting mammoths, and scientists have found no evidence that mammoths and people were here at the same time. Scientists do not know why so many mammoths died in Tolo Lake, but they probably died there one at a time over hundreds of years, likely from age or illness or after becoming stuck in the lake’s sticky mud during droughts or changes in climate.