Have you seen the new blockbuster 10,000 BC ? That prehistoric mashup of sabertooths, warlords, and pyramids? Well, we haven’t. But we’ve read the reviews, and we’re no fools. (We already saw Beowulf ! What more do you people want?)

Anyway, what we've heard about the movie made us wonder about one of the animals featured in the mix: mammoths. Seeing as we just edited a piece for the April issue of National Geographic comparing mammoths and mastodons, two members of the once-diverse order Proboscidea (biggest difference: mammoths were bigger), we naturally wondered: Does 10,000 BC actually depict mammoths? Or could those CGI monsters be mastodons? The untrained eye (or CGI animator) might have a hard time telling the difference, so we asked a couple of folks who are as trained as they come.

Ross MacPhee is the curator of vertebrate zoology and mammology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “You’re about the tenth media organization to call me about this in the last few days,” he complained. “It’s strange: My astrophysicist friends never seem to get calls about whether a ‘Death Star’ would work!” Then he confessed that he hadn’t seen 10,000 BC, either.

But, he said, “to the degree that you can tell—from what I can glean from the one second I’ve caught in the trailer—it’s clear that [the filmmakers] modeled the movements on mammoths. Mastodons were built closer to the ground, so they would have looked odd, like squat elephants. Also, [the animals in the movie] clearly have spiral tusks, same as mammoths.”

Next up: Daniel Fisher, a geology professor at the University of Michigan and a curator of the school’s Museum of Paleontology. Fisher says he hasn’t caught the movie (we’re sensing a pattern here), but one of his students has. “From what I’ve heard,” says Fisher, “the animals weren’t done very well, so there may have been some real uncertainties in the filmmakers’ minds about which animal was which.”

He says the potential confusion may stem, in part, from the fact that humans hunted both mammoths and mastodons, though there’s far more archaeological evidence—20 sites worldwide versus two—that they killed the former more often. The protagonist of 10,000 BC is apparently a mammoth hunter, but Fisher says that’s not especially telling. “The evidence that humans hunted mastodons is tenuous, but that’s not to say it’s not compelling,” he says. “In fact, I would argue there’s quite a bit of evidence of both hunting and butchery [of mastodons]. So who knows?”

As nice and helpful as these two experts were, we’re beginning to think there’s nothing for it: If we really want to get a sense of what’s running ’round onscreen, we should just go see the movie already. Or find someone—anyone!—who has.

Does that include you? What do you think: mammoths or mastodons? We’re all ears.

-Jeremy Berlin

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