The Peterborough Evening Telegraph
Rare mammoth tusk put on show at museum
A juvenile mammoth tusk, described as a “special” find by palaeontologists, was put on display in a museum at halfterm.
The well-preserved tusk, which is nearly a metre long, went on show at the Fossils Galore museum and educational activity centre in March.
The museum is run by Jamie Jordan, a palaeontologist who was asked to identify and preserve the tusk.
He told the Peterborough Telegraph he “couldn’t believe it” when gravel extraction workers unearthed it in a Cambridgeshire quarry in February 2022.
His investigations revealed the tusk was between 28,000 and 30,000 years old.
Jamie said that, while it is not uncommon to find adult mammoth remains within our region, the same cannot be said of younger mammoths.
“Juvenile material of mammoths just doesn’t really survive,” he explained, “because it’s so fragile.”
The 33-year-old palaeontologist reckoned the site of the remains – in what was an old Ice Age river channel with silt at the bottom – probably helped the tusk to stay in such good condition. “It was found in a very silty sort of layer, which has lots of plant matter in there and is quite sandy as well.”
Jamie believes this had a cushioning effect which
helped keep the tusk “packaged up, ready for all the glacial
melt [and] gravel to run over the top of it.”
The indications are that the tusk came from a mammoth a few metres long, around 1.5 metres tall, and weighing close to a tonne.
The animal would’ve been about eight to ten years old and roamed the tundra in our local area towards the end of the Ice Age. Jamie is thrilled that the tusk was able to go on show, especially as he initially thought the tusk had “no chance” of surviving the 12-month preservation stage.
A year later things look very different: “Low and behold it’s taken us nearly a year to get it to this stage,” he said, “and now it’s fully preserved and ready for display.” The tusk was on show at Fossils Galore throughout February half-term.
After that, it was returned to be displayed at the quarry where it was discovered.