An article on the Natural History of Utah Museum website poses the question, “Where did all the mammoths go?”
Well, now we know. They will reemerge on the ice wearing skates and carrying sticks at Delta Center as Utah’s NHL franchise. OK, not actual mammoths, but their modern likeness will be on the jersey of every player on the team.
Smith Entertainment Group announced Wednesday that the Utah Hockey Club will now be known as Utah Mammoth.
“Ten thousand years ago, the mammoth roamed throughout the state and claimed Utah as their home. Now they roam again,” according to the team. Mammoth, the team said, represents “strength, momentum and an earth-shattering presence.”
The new name was chosen after a 13-month process with four rounds of online and in-person fan voting, totaling more than 850,000 votes. Mammoth had the most votes by a wide margin, per the team.
Tyler Faith, Natural History Museum of Utah chief curator and curator of paleontology, was among those who voted online for Mammoth.
“I was pulling for it. As a total paleontology nerd, I mean, come on,” he said. “I’m excited by that … If I could go back to any point in time, it would be 15,000 years ago to go see these things.”
Utah has a history with the massive elephant-like creatures that roamed North America, including the Great Basin, which covers much of what makes up the state today. Mammoths inhabited the area during the last Ice Age, which is known as the Pleistocene Epoch. The most common species in this region was the Columbian mammoth. Unlike the shaggy woolly mammoth found farther north, it more closely resembled an African bush elephant.
“There’s a long history of mammoths all over Utah,” Faith said, adding they were the ”biggest and baddest” large mammals on the scene that included saber-toothed cats and giant ground sloths.
Mammoths stood as much as 14 feet tall, weighed up to 22,000 pounds, and used their curved tusks to dig through snow and fend off predators. Evidence suggests they charged in herds at speeds exceeding 25 miles per hour, comparable to the speeds reached by the fastest skaters in the NHL.
Fossilized mammoth remains have been discovered across the state, including on the Wasatch Front and the Lake Bonneville basin. Lake Bonneville was a large prehistoric lake that covered much of western Utah during the Pleistocene era, providing a rich environment for mammoths and other prehistoric animals, according to the natural history museum.
And you don’t have to go to a hockey game to see a mammoth.
In 1988, a nearly complete skeleton of a Columbian mammoth was found in Huntington Canyon in the Manti-La Sal National Forest in Emery County. The discovery was unusual because it was made at high altitude, which was not typical for the species. The Huntington Mammoth’s remains are preserved in the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum.
Replica casts of mammoths are also on display at the Natural History of Utah Museum in Salt Lake City and the Fairview Museum of History and Art in Fairview.
Starting June 7, the Utah natural history museum will open an exhibit called “Mysteries of the Ice Ages.” It wouldn’t be surprising to see people wandering the museum in Mammoth jerseys looking for mammoth skeletons.
Faith sees some possible synergy with the hockey club. “I’m sure our development team is super jazzed to see the potential crossover,” he said.
A 2019 Deseret News story detailed the discovery of mammoth bones at an undisclosed location near Lake Powell two years earlier.
“This is very, very exciting,” Randall Irmis, the then-curator of paleontology at the natural history museum, said, adding it was almost certainly a Columbian mammoth. “That’s a relative of today’s elephants and it’s closely related to the woolly mammoth but probably wasn’t nearly as furry.”
Ed and Linda Gledhill found a jawbone and teeth of a baby mammoth along the shore of a receding Bear Lake in 1992. Subsequent excavation unearthed 14 bone fragments, indicating a mammoth that died 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.
In 1937, Daniel Thomas discovered a large mammoth tooth while digging an irrigation trench in his yard in what is now the Cherry Hill neighborhood of Orem. Excavations by the University of Utah later revealed additional remains.
“I could totally nerd out here,” Faith says as he talked about mammoths.
Mammoth populations ranged across North America as well as Europe and Asia. The last of the creatures succumbed to extinction about 4,000 years ago, according to Faith.
“Was it human impacts? Climate change? Some combination of both?” he said in the museum article.
Experts, he said, have debate the possibilities for over a century but have not reached agreement. They have compared possible reasons for what might have happened to many other large animals such as saber-toothed cats and giant ground sloths at the end of the Ice Age.
Some believe that human hunters best explain the pattern, with extinctions seeming to follow humans’ path out of Africa and through the rest of the world. Others note how only a few extinct species were prey and that causes like a warming, drier climate changed ecosystems in a profound way. Still others think both were at play, hunting and climate change setting the state of ecological collapse.
“Though we have long focused on these causes of the extinctions, there is now a growing interest in understanding their consequences,” Faith said.
Big animals — like mastodons and mammoths — have outsized effects on the surrounding environment because of the vegetation they eat, the seeds they disperse, where they walk and how much dung they produce. Faith called mammoths a “keystone” species by virtue of their enormous size.
“They influence the entire ecosystem,” he said. Today, he said fire does the job that many big mammals did 10,000 years ago.
“We are only beginning to dive into these kinds of problems,” he said, “so there is still a lot to be learned.”

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