Woolly mammoth

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), also called the tundra mammoth, is an extinct species of mammoth. This animal is known from bones and frozen carcasses from northern North America and northern Eurasia with the best preserved carcasses in Siberia.

This mammoth species was first recorded in (possibly 150,000 years old) deposits of the second last glaciation in Eurasia. It disappeared from most of its range at the end of the Pleistocene (10,000 years ago), with a dwarfed race still living on Wrangel Island until roughly 1700 BC

Wooly mammoth in "A Different Flesh"
The hairy elephant went extinct everywhere but in North America about 10,000 years ago. When Europeans arrived in in the New World, they quickly saw the potential for the hairy elephant as a beast of burden. The hairy elephant was used to power the railroads of North America until the middle 18th century, when they were phased out by the steam engine.

In 1661 Samuel Pepys attended a lecture at Royal Society concerning the recent discovery of the remains of a hairy elephant in Swanscombe, England. This led Pepys to wonder why the beasts had died out in Europe but remained alive in the New World. He concluded that men were better hunters than sims and so had hunted the elephants to extinction while the sims had not. This, in turn, helped Pepys to eventually develop his Transformational theory of life.