Who discovered mammoths?

Woolly mammoth bones had been seen and even traded by the native Siberians for thousands of years before Europeans heard of them. However, the Siberian people believed that the bones came from giant moles. When Europeans heard of the bones, they thought that they came from giants or behemothes.

Hans Sloane, a British scientist, discovered that the bones came from elephants when he was studying a mammoth tooth in 1728. He believed that the elephant bones were carried there in the Biblical Great Flood, or that Siberia had previously been much warmer.

In 1796, French scientist Georges Cuvierer determined that the mammoth wasn't a modern elephant, and that instead, it was an extinct species (extinction wasn't a highly accepted concept at the time). In 1828, Joshua Brooks realized that mammoths belonged to an extinct genus, and gave them the woolly mammoth its current scientific name, Mammuthus primigenius.