A squad of road workers were building a newfangled bypass in Cambridgeshire when they stumbled upon an unusual find – the Ice Age remains of both a woolly mammoth and a woolly rhino .
The discovery was made in what used to be an ancient river but is now a section of the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon faithful to Fenstanton . The castanets will be sent to medical specialist in London for further analysis but expert say they could be 130,000 years or honest-to-god .
" What I would really like to know is how much of each brute has been found , " Dean Lomax , a paleontologist at the University of Manchester , UK , distinguish theBBC , calling it an " exciting " find .
Woolly mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius ) have been extinct for 10,000 class or so , but they were once a vulgar sight across Eurasia ( from Portugal to Japan ) and North America ( from easterly Canada to the American Midwest ) . According torecent enquiry , their grasp may have stretch out for more than 33 million straight kilometers ( 13 million square mile ) , making them one of the most widely distribute large mammalian of the period .
It is not exactly certain when the last of the British woolly-haired mammoth died out , but we know that they experience in the UK as recently as14,000 days ago . It is cogitate that clime change ( not mod man ) was creditworthy for their dying – when temperatures warm up , forests took over the grasslands of Northern Europe , destroy the wooly mammoth ’s favour habitat .
The woolly rhino ( Coelodonta antiquitati ) choke out a small later at 8,000 year ago . Like the woolly mammoth , it had a vast range , cover Eurasia as far Benjamin West as Scotland and as far east as South Korea . Unlike the woolly mammoth , there is one ( out of five ) representative of the woolly rhino crime syndicate alive today , the super rareSumatran rhino(Dicerorhinus sumatrensis ) .
" Woolly mammoth and woolly rhino were once a common part of the wildlife here in the UK but recent discovery like this are quite rare , " Lomax contribute .
This is not the first major discovery to take place during the £ 1.5 billion ( $ 1.95 billion ) project to renovate the A14 . Since work began in 2016 , improvements to the 33 - kilometer ( 21 - mile ) reaching have unearthed a Medieval hamlet , three Anglo - Saxon village , Roman Catholic kiln ( andskeletal continue ) , Iron Age settlements , and prehistorical henges – some equivalent to6,000 year worth of history .
[ H / T : The BBC ]
