Mammoth tusk present in North Jutland gravel pit

Usually, it’s stone and sand that the development firm NCC shovels out from Siem Grusgrav at Terndrup between Støvring and Hadsund.

However on Thursday 16 Could, machine operator Kristian Lang Hedegaard made a fairly uncommon discover, as he got here throughout a supposed mammoth tusk in the course of the pile of stones and sand. That is what the Pure Historical past Museum in Aarhus writes in a press launch.

– Whenever you discover a set of tooth from a mammoth, you get just a little extra consideration than regular. It is wonderful what can come out of a traditional work day. You do not count on prehistory to all of a sudden seem out of the gravel fairly actually. At first we thought it was a department, but it surely turned out to be historic, says the person behind the discover, Kristian Lang Hedegaard.

NCC Danmark A/S extracts pure supplies to be used within the building business. Throughout digging, the tusk has been shoveled out, following which it has handed via their equipment, which kinds the supplies aside.

– One thing signifies that there’s a contemporary break within the tooth, so it might have been even greater. Nonetheless, it’s restricted how a lot might be stated regarding it right now. What is for certain, nonetheless, is that it’s a utterly distinctive discover, it says.

NCC instantly contacted the Pure Historical past Museum in Aarhus, and at present the bizarre discover from the previous has thus been handed over to the museum, which is thrilled to have obtained it.

– It’s a distinctive discover. Not many such finds have been made in Denmark. Now we wish to make it possible for it doesn’t crack additional, following which we register it, pack it up and hope that somebody can use it in a analysis context, which we’re all the time very open to, reviews Simon Kongshøj Callesen, who’s a set worker and biologist with a specialization in palaeontology on the Pure Historical past Museum in Aarhus.

Historical mammoth?

Siem Grusgrav is a meltwater gravel pit from the Weichsel Ice Age, the place, amongst different issues, lived woolly mammoths. Wooden elephants, then once more, are from the Center Eem (pre-Weichselian), and this results in the belief that the tusk might also be from their youthful and woollier cousin.

It’s not identified whether or not the tusk is from Denmark.
Photograph: Pure Historical past Museum in Aarhus

In case you subsequently take the substrate within the gravel pit into consideration, the tusk might be from a woolly mammoth. Nonetheless, neither the species nor the time interval might be decided with certainty but, as this requires extra detailed exams.

Whether it is from a woolly mammoth, it may be something between 9,600 and 115,000 years previous. Mammoths grew to become extinct in Scandinavia roughly 10,000 years in the past.

Whether or not it’s from Denmark can also be not identified. Through the Weichsel interval, the tooth might have both been transported from afar by a glacier – or washed from a glacier and ended up in Terndrup in North Jutland.

The Pure Historical past Museum already has a mammoth molar on show in a show case close to the doorway to the museum in Universitetsparken in Aarhus. This explicit one was additionally discovered by the NCC and submitted to the museum once more in 2020.

2024-05-21 18:23:09
#Mammoth #tusk #North #Jutland #gravel #pit

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