Mammoth fossil jaw
Quaternary, from Pleistocene gravels at Grovelands, Reading
Lower jaw of young woolly mammoth, Pleistocene, from Grovelands
The woolly mammoth was an animal of open grassland and tundra, which is now extinct. It thrived in the cold climate of the Quaternary (later Pleistocene) ice ages, from about 200,000 to 10,000 years ago. As shown by cave paintings and frozen specimens that have been found in Siberia, it had a thick woolly coat. Its high-crowned molar teeth were densely ridged, making a rough grinding surface adapted to chewing the tough steppe grasses. This mammoth jaw is fairly small, at 40cm wide. It is the lower mandible and contains the second and third milk molars, which give an indication of the animal's age when it died. Unlike most mammals, elephants have a succession of teeth throughout their life. They have three sets of deciduous (milk) molars, then their adult premolars and molars grow in to replace them from behind as they wear out and are shed. At most two pairs of teeth in each jaw are in use at any one time, and when an elephant has worn out its last set it will die from starvation. In the Indian elephant, which is the most closely-related species alive today, the first milk molar is shed in its second year, the second in its fifth. If mammoths shed their teeth at a similar rate, this animal would have been between two and five years old.
Grovelands was a brick and tile pit at Elm Park, Reading, exploiting the clays that underlie the Thames gravels. As excavation was carried out by hand fossils were often spotted by the quarrymen.
Museum object number
Chordata, class Mammalia, Proboscidea, family Elephantidae, Mammuthus primigenius s. trogontheri
Elephas primigenius s. trogontheri