Mammoth Emoji

A woolly mammoth, the shaggy Ice Age giant that went extinct about 4,000 years ago. Usually shown with curved ivory tusks, reddish-brown shaggy fur, and a domed head. Emojipedia notes it was approved in Unicode 13.0 (2020) as U+1F9A3U+1F9A3, alongside 🦬 bison, 🦫 beaver, and 🦤 dodo.

🦣 has three completely different jobs. The first is the literal mammoth: paleontology content, Ice Age memes, museum posts. The second is "mammoth" as an adjective for "huge," as in "mammoth task" or "mammoth undertaking." The third, which showed up unexpectedly, is Mastodon, the decentralized social platform whose logo is a stylized mastodon (a close mammoth relative). When Twitter convulsed under new ownership in late 2022, 🦣 became shorthand for "I'm migrating to Mastodon."

The emoji arrived just in time for another unlikely cultural moment: Colossal Biosciences' real-world attempt to bring the woolly mammoth back. Founded in 2021 by geneticist George Church) and entrepreneur Ben Lamm, Colossal has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to resurrect the species by the late 2020s. 🦣 now carries a faint whiff of "maybe not extinct forever."

🦣 has a weirdly active life for a dead animal. The Mastodon migration in late 2022 drove the emoji into social-media discourse. "Find me on Mastodon 🦣" became a signal flag for anyone trying out the fediverse. Mastodon went from 300K monthly users to over 2.5 million in weeks, and app downloads surged 6,380%. The emoji outlived the hype cycle; long-term Mastodon users still use it as their platform marker.

The "huge" sense is quietly everywhere. "Mammoth week at work 🦣" or "mammoth deadline" reads instantly. It's a sturdier, weightier alternative to 😮 or 💀 when something is literally or figuratively massive.

Paleontology Twitter and science influencers use 🦣 whenever a new Siberian carcass turns up, when Colossal announces a milestone, or when debates about de-extinction ethics flare back up. It's one of the few animal emojis that gets a steady stream of real breaking news.

The mammoth emoji came in as part of Unicode 13.0 (2020), approved in March and rolled out on iOS 14.2 in November 2020. It was part of a batch that included 🦬 bison, 🦫 beaver, 🦤 dodo, and several other "missing" animals. Unicode's committee specifically flagged prehistoric and recently extinct species as a category worth filling in.

🦣's unexpected second life started in October 2022, when Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter. Users frustrated with the changes started migrating to Mastodon, an open-source, decentralized alternative founded by Eugen Rochko in 2016. Mastodon's logo is a stylized mastodon silhouette (close relative of the mammoth), and 🦣 became the platform's informal emoji. App downloads spiked 6,380% in the weeks after the Twitter deal closed.

Meanwhile, Colossal Biosciences was founded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm with the explicit goal of using CRISPR to bring the woolly mammoth back. They've raised hundreds of millions in venture funding and target the late 2020s for a first "mammoth-like" elephant calf. In 2025, Colossal announced genetically engineered "woolly mice" as a proof-of-concept for the cold-adapted genes they want to transfer. 🦣 now carries actual "we might not be extinct" energy.

1. 2020Mammoth emoji approved in Unicode 13.0 / Emoji 13.0. Ships on iOS 14.2 (November)
2. 2021Colossal Biosciences founded by George Church and Ben Lamm with explicit mammoth revival goal↗
3. 2022🦣 becomes the emoji of the Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus; downloads surge 6,380%↗
4. 2025Colossal reveals genetically engineered 'woolly mice' with mammoth-style cold adaptations as proof of concept

• •Woolly mammoths went extinct in two waves. The mainland population died out about 10,000 years ago as the Ice Age ended. The last isolated population on Wrangel Island survived until roughly 2000 BCE.
• •A full-grown male woolly mammoth stood about 3 meters (10 ft) at the shoulder and weighed up to 6 metric tons. Their tusks could exceed 4 meters and weigh 115 kg.
• •Mammoths had a fat layer up to 10 cm (4 inches) thick for insulation and specially adapted hemoglobin that worked efficiently in extreme cold, similar to Arctic fish.
• •Lyuba, a mammoth calf found in Siberia in 2007, is the most intact mammoth ever discovered. Her stomach still contained milk; her intestines still had traces of her mother's dung, which calves eat to seed their gut bacteria.
• •The Mastodon social platform surged from about 300K to 2.5 million monthly active users during the late-2022 Twitter exodus. App downloads jumped 6,380%, giving the mammoth emoji a surprise second job as a social-media marker.
• •Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by George Church and Ben Lamm, has raised hundreds of millions to bring the mammoth back. Their 2025 "woolly mice" were a proof-of-concept for the cold-adaptation genes they plan to transfer into Asian elephant embryos.
• •Male mammoths had temporal glands between the ear and eye, indicating they went into musth (a period of heightened aggression and testosterone) like modern male elephants.
• •The word "mammoth" comes from the Russian мамонт (mamont), which was borrowed from a Finno-Ugric or Siberian Indigenous language. Europeans first encountered the word through 17th-century traders in Siberian ivory.
• •An estimated 500,000 tons of mammoth ivory still sit frozen in Siberian permafrost. As climate change thaws the tundra, this ivory is increasingly being excavated, creating a controversial trade that some argue reduces pressure on living elephant ivory markets.

• •Ice Age (2002) and its sequels) star Manny, a woolly mammoth voiced by Ray Romano. The franchise grossed over $6 billion worldwide and is most people's mental image of a mammoth.
• •The Royal BC Museum's mammoth exhibit in Victoria, Canada, is a must-visit Canadian paleontology icon, featuring one of the most famous life-sized woolly mammoth reconstructions in the world.
• •Mastodon the social platform was founded by Eugen Rochko in 2016 and exploded into mainstream awareness during the 2022 Twitter upheaval. Its logo is a stylized mastodon silhouette, and 🦣 is its emoji.
• •Colossal Biosciences has become the face of the de-extinction movement. Founder George Church, a Harvard geneticist, is one of the most-cited biologists on Earth and a central figure in CRISPR research.
• •The 10,000 Year Clock in Texas is intentionally designed to outlast all of human history we've so far written. It's calibrated against the extinction of the mammoth (about 4,000 years ago) as a scale comparison.