CONTINUING EDUCATION DEPT.TUSKS UP

In early May, the N.H.L.’s newest team, a year-old Salt Lake City-based franchise provisionally known as the Utah Hockey Club, unveiled its official name and mascot, after considering such options as Black Diamonds, Blast, Blizzard, Canyons, Caribou, Freeze, Frost, Fury, Glaciers, Hive, Ice, Mountaineers, Outlaws, Powder, Squall, Swarm, Venom, and Yeti. Behold: the Utah Mammoth.

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Skepticism ensued in some quarters (“Are they collectively one mammoth? Like imagine if it was Pittsburgh Penguin,” a Tampa Bay Lightning fan, Chef Boyardipshit, posted on X), but excitement abounded elsewhere, including among paleontologists and mammalogists. (Utah is rich with mammoth fossils.) After the announcement, the Mammoth forward Alex Kerfoot, age thirty, and defenseman Sean Durzi, age twenty-six, travelled to New York City. They showed off their new Mammoth gear on the NHL Network, at a Knicks playoff game, and at the American Museum of Natural History, where they communed with the fossils of their new namesake. Durzi and Kerfoot are both dark-haired, affable, and Canadian. En route to the mammoth exhibit, after getting lightly heckled by a museumgoer in a NASA hat, they were wowed in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs.

“I love the museum!” Durzi said, taking a picture of a T. rex skull. “So cool.”

Kerfoot admired a sixty-four-foot skeleton of an Apatosaurus—what laypeople might call a Brontosaurus. “This thing's huge, eh?” he said.

Durzi turned around. “This was walking the earth at one point,” he said. “Are you kidding me?”

“How many humans, do you think, to take down one of those guys?” Kerfoot asked.

“I don't even want to—I like these guys,” Durzi said. Hypothetically? “Uh, depends. If it was me? Probably just me.”