Juvenile Woolly Mammoth Jaw Section - Interesting History!

This is a very cool fossil with an interesting backstory to it. It is a partial lower jaw of a baby juvenile Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). It comes from the North Sea deposits and would be between 20 and 50 thousand years old. It's in wonderful shape for being submerged for that period of time.

This fossil was originally found around 1890 when it was dredged up in the North Sea. It ended up being acquired by a professor at the University of Kansas where it sat on his desk until his death. It then ended up in a second hand store in Kansas City before being "rescued" and recycled back into the fossil world. It's a great piece, it's unusual to get jaw sections with the teeth still in place from the North Sea.

These pleistocene fossils are dredged up by fishing trawlers in the the North Sea between Britain and Denmark. Fishermen routinely find mammoth teeth and many ice aged fossils in their nets and given the chance that a fossil is accidentally gathered in a net is slim the sea floor is probably littered with the remains of millions of animals. The cold temperatures and low oxygen environment of the North Sea has aided in the preservation of these teeth and bones.