From Norfolk to Ilford

Mammoths in Britain

Fossils of southern mammoths, steppe mammoths and woolly mammoths have all been found in Britain. Natural History Museum About two million years ago, Lister says, a species called Mammuthus meridionalis appears. It survived for about a million years, and there are very abundant fossils all the way from Britain to China. It is also known as the southern or ancestral mammoth. Natural History Museum

The Ilford mammoth skull, which belongs to a steppe mammoth, is the largest and most complete of its kind ever found in Britain. It was discovered by workers in Ilford in East London in 1864 who were digging for clay to make bricks. Lister says the sample is kind of an intermediate stage between the steppe mammoth and the woolly mammoth, about 200,000 years old. Natural History Museum

These British fossils are part of a much longer story that begins in Africa and ends, for the last herds, on Arctic islands. That wider map is on where they lived, and the last islands are on the last mammoths.