Fossil hunters stumble across remarkable find in UK quarry
A fossil hunter has discovered a 400,000-year-old mammoth tusk sticking out of the ground at a rocky quarry in Cambridgeshire.
On July 11, Jamie Jordan and his colleague, Sarah Moore, were on a ‘fossil walk’ searching for samples in a quarry when they noticed a ‘tube-like structure’ popping out of the sand.
They were initially unsure what it was but quickly realised it was a mammoth tusk.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Mr Jordan told LiveScience. ‘It’s something that you don’t expect to find. Normally you see on TV… or you see in books, where someone’s come across a tusk just laying there… and lo and behold, it happened to me.’
The tusk was roughly 4 feet (1.2 metres) long and in excellent condition. It belonged to a male steppe mammoth that would have been about 13 feet (4 metres) tall.
Steppe mammoths were the second-largest species of mammoth that ever roamed Earth. They lived in Europe and Asia from about 1.8 million to 200,000 years ago during a period of time called the early and middle Pleistocene.
The Pleistocene was a geological epoch that lasted 2,580,000 years when the Earth experienced dramatic climate change, and many large mammals went extinct.
The tusk is now undergoing a preservation process that will take approximately six months to complete at the Fossils Galore Museum, where Jordan is the founder and curator.
The public will be able to witness the preservation work at the museum in March, Cambridgeshire.
‘It’s going to take us about six months in total, we reckon, to fully preserve this tusk, and we will be doing it on full display to the public,’ said Ms Moore, speaking to EuroNews. ‘So anyone that comes down to the museum will actually be able to see behind the scenes and see how we do it.’
While Mr Jordan and Ms Moore have previously found other mammoth fossils including toe bones, teeth and even a different tusk, this newly found tusk is much better preserved.
Mr Jordan said this was because the quarry was flooded for a few years when it was dug up, then recently drained, which kept the fossil from drying out and crumbling.
The discovery of a mammoth in England serves as a reminder of the effect of climate change on animals. Steppe mammoths were adapted to cold, dry environments.
However, the climate began to change around 200,000 years ago, becoming warmer and wetter, which led to the extinction of the species.
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