A HORN OF PLENTY! Fisherman’s shock after finding relic of extinct beast
IT’S the amazing discovery that sheds light on a time when giant wild cattle roamed the South Wales coastline. Brothers and traditional lave net fishermen Martin and Richard Morgan were walking on the Severn estuary when they came across a giant animal horn buried in the sand.
After initially mistaking it for a piece of wood, they discovered it belonged to a breed of giant wild cattle called the aurochs, which became extinct in the 17th century.
The wild grazing cattle were thought to stand around 2m tall (6ft), and for thousands of years were one of the largest land mammals in Europe.
A number of their horns , which can reach to around
80cm in size, have been found washed up on beaches and river banks across Britain.
Martin, from
Undy, near Caldicot, said: “This is our fishing grounds, we fish on the Severn Estuary – it’s the point of the second greatest tidal range in the world.
“At low tide, we’re able to walk out onto our fishing grounds and even though it’s not the lave net fishing season at the moment, we spend quite a lot of time out here keeping an eye on things – a bit of bait gathering and keeping an eye out for poachers.
“W e don’t usually look out for stuff in the summer time, but we had a bit of unusual weather last week, with high winds, so we thought we’d have a wander out there.”
Martin and Richard – who are part of the Black Rock Lave Net Heritage Fishery – have walked the route dozens of times, and had wandered a couple of miles off shore when they made the discovery on Tuesday.
“The storms last week had moved a sand bank and running water had created a new gully, so this must have exposed the auroch’s horn, just the back end of it. My brother had a good idea what it was. I thought it might have been a piece of wood or a maybe a bit of bone. But, when he got down close to it, he could see it resembled part of a horn.”
Martin added: “We’ve found a few vertebrae of aurochs before and a few small bones, but nothing on this scale....
“If you can imagine, the estuary thousands of years ago would have been land.
“We sometimes find tree stumps turned to peat, so there would have been lots of forestry and woodlands. But, when the sea levels rose years ago, everything would have been enveloped by water – including some of the forest wildlife that was out there, like the aurochs, wild boar and wolves. It happened to find its way to this sandbank and was washed up – after being buried for hundreds of years.
“We were in the right place at the right time.”
Martin is now keeping the horn in a barrel of water at home, and is hoping to get it looked over by an expert when the lockdown permits.