Mormons believe that Joseph Smith was given the Nephite derivatives "curelom" and "cumom" rather than some other word variant referring to these animals in his supposed translation of this passage from the Reformed Egyptian. Some Mormons have speculated about what the terms refer to including:
Modern paleontologists contend that mastodons and mammoths went extinct thousands of years before Book of Mormon times.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump