Moving mammoths Mammoths are a particularly charismatic example of our Pleistocene megafuana. Lister and Sher took a detailed look at mammoth fossils globally and suggest that the North American Columbian mammoth, thought to have arisen from a European species, probably evolved from a more advanced Asian species. Similar dispersal events of Asian mammoths led to later colonization events in Europe and North America. Science , this issue p. 805