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Mammoths and mastodons, the ancient Ice Age relatives of elephants, weren't the nomadic beasts that people previously believed.

A new US study suggests these creature were 'home bodies', and particularly enjoyed spending time in the area of Cincinnati.

They even had their own preferred hangouts, with the research suggesting that each species of mammoth and mastodon kept to separate areas based the types of food available.

Research led by University of Cincinnati's Professor Brooke Crowley (pictured) suggests mammoths and mastodons, the ancient Ice Age relatives of elephants, weren't the nomadic beasts that people previously believed. Professor Crowley is pictured here posing with a mammoth lower jaw

The study was led by Brooke Crowley, an assistant professor of geology and anthropology at the University of Cincinnati.

'I suspect that this was a pretty nice place to live, relatively speaking,' Professor Crowley says. 'Our data suggest that animals probably had what they needed to survive here year-round.'

Learning more about the different behaviour of these prehistoric creatures could benefit their modern-day cousins, African and Asian elephants. Both types are on the World Wildlife Fund's endangered species list.

Learning more about the different behaviour of these prehistoric creatures could benefit their modern-day cousins, African and Asian elephants. Both types are on the World Wildlife Fund's endangered species list. Pictured is an artist's impression of a mammoth

Studying how variable different types of elephants might have been in the past, Professor Crowley said, might help ongoing efforts to protect these largest of land mammals from continued threats such as poaching and habitat destruction.

'There are regionally different stories going on,' Professor Crowley says. 'There's not one overarching theme that we can say about a mammoth or a mastodon.

'And that's becoming more obvious in studies people are doing in different places. A mammoth in Florida did not behave the same as one in New York, Wyoming, California, Mexico or Ohio.'

The researchers looked to the wisdom in teeth – specifically museum specimens of molars from four mastodons and eight mammoths from Southwestern Ohio and Northwestern Kentucky.

Drilling a tooth's surface and analysing the stable carbon, oxygen and strontium isotopic signatures in the powdered enamel can tell a story.

Carbon provides insight into an animal's diet, oxygen relates to overall climatic conditions of an animal's environment and strontium indicates how much an animal may have travelled at the time its tooth was forming.

'Strontium reflects the bedrock geology of a location,' Professor Crowley says. 'So if a local animal grows its tooth and mineralises it locally and dies locally, the strontium isotope ratio in its tooth will reflect the place where it lived and died.

'If an animal grows its tooth in one place and then moves elsewhere, the strontium in its tooth is going to reflect where it came from, not where it died.'

Professor Crowley (pictured) used isotopic analysis in her research. Here she works with samples of bones from extinct lemurs

Their analysis revealed that mammoths ate more grasses and sedges than mastodons, which favoured leaves from trees or shrubs.

Strontium from all of the animals - except one mastodon - matched local water samples, meaning they likely were less mobile and migratory than previously thought.

Meanwhile, differences in strontium and carbon between mammoths and mastodons suggest they didn't inhabit the same localities.

Mammoths preferred to be closer to the retreating ice sheet where grasses were more abundant, whereas mastodons fed farther from the ice sheet in more forested habitat.

'As a geologist, questioning the past is one of the most interesting and exciting things to do,' says Professor Baumann, an environmental geologist with a contractor for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

'Based on our data, mammoths and mastodons seemed to have different diets and lived in different areas during their lives.

'This is important because it allows us to understand how species in the past lived and interacted. And the past is the key to the present.' 

Mammoths preferred to be closer to the retreating ice sheet where grasses were more abundant, whereas mastodons (artist's impression pictured) fed farther from the ice sheet in more forested habitat