On July 11, Jordan and his colleague, Sarah Moore, were on a “fossil walk” searching for samples in a quarry in Cambridgeshire, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) north of London, when they noticed a “tube-like structure” popping out of the sand, he said.
The mammoth tusk that is believed to be more than 400,000 years old. It is roughly 4 feet (1.2 meters) long, belonged to a steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii) — the second-largest species of mammoth that ever roamed Earth.
When they inspected the find, they realized it was a steppe mammoth tusk, which they believe is from a fully grown male that would have been about 13 feet (4 m) tall, Jordan said.
These behemoths wandered Asia and eventually Europe and North America around 1.8 million to 200,000 years ago, during the icy early and middle Pleistocene. They were the ancestors of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) — the last species of mammoth to exist.
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On July 11, Jordan and his colleague, Sarah Moore, were on a “fossil walk” searching for samples in a quarry in Cambridgeshire, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) north of London, when they noticed a “tube-like structure” popping out of the sand, he said.
The mammoth tusk that is believed to be more than 400,000 years old. It is roughly 4 feet (1.2 meters) long, belonged to a steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii) — the second-largest species of mammoth that ever roamed Earth.
When they inspected the find, they realized it was a steppe mammoth tusk, which they believe is from a fully grown male that would have been about 13 feet (4 m) tall, Jordan said.
These behemoths wandered Asia and eventually Europe and North America around 1.8 million to 200,000 years ago, during the icy early and middle Pleistocene. They were the ancestors of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) — the last species of mammoth to exist.