Amherst College replaces Lord Jeff mascot with Mammoths
AMHERST, Mass. (AP) Get ready to cheer for the Amherst College Mammoths.
The Massachusetts school Monday announced that its athletic teams will be known as the Mammoths after a yearlong selection process and vote that involved thousands of alumni, students and faculty.
The selection board said people who suggested mammoths noted they are ''impressive,'' ''stupendous and monumental,'' and ''near mythic.''
Backers also noted the school's natural history museum houses a mammoth skeleton discovered by Amherst professor Frederick Brewster Loomis and brought to the college in 1925.
The process started in January 2016 when school trustees decided the school's unofficial nickname, Lord Jeffs, was inappropriate in part because the 18th century British Gen. Jeffery Amherst suggested giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans.
The board initially received hundreds of sometimes whimsical and silly suggestions.
