North Sea Mammoth Tusks at the Dinosaur Museum!

Two

woolly mammoth tusks, originating from the North Sea, have gone on display at

the Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester as the centrepiece of a display on Mammoths.

Curator

of the Dinosaur Museum, Tim Batty, said: “The new display comes at a time when

new research has revealed that humans were not responsible for the extinction

of the mammoths. It had traditionally been thought that mammoths had been

hunted to extinction but it now appears that it was climate change that caused

their extinction”.

Between

50,000 and 20,000 years ago the North Sea did not exist and England was

connected to the continent by low-lying pastures. Prehistoric mammals such as

mammoths, woolly rhinos, horse and bison fed off the fertile lands.

The

tusks date to the end of this period and are unusually coloured owing to them

having been in water, under the sea, for so long a time. The fully-grown tusks

of Woolly Mammoths were up to 5 metres long and very curved. They were possibly

used to aid the search for food and to demonstrate sexual prowess. The sections

of tusk on display are each about 1.5m long.

The tusks had become buried in the thin layers of sand at the bottom of the shallow

southern region of the North Sea. Here they remained for thousands of years as

they became fossilised. Eventually tidal currents and dredging released these

fossilised remains to be caught in fishing nets of a trawler, and now they are

on display for all to see at Dorchester’s unique museum.