West Runton Elephant

1 of 4 | Next

Discovery
The story begins on 13 December 1990 when, following a stormy night, local residents Harold and Margaret Hems took a walk on the beach. They found a large bone partly exposed at the bottom of the cliffs, and contacted Norfolk Museums Service. It was identified as a pelvic bone of a large elephant. Just over a year later after another storm several more huge bones were discovered, some by local fossil collector Rob Sinclair. This was obviously a find of major significance, and in January 1992 the first exploratory excavation took place. Once the results of this had been evaluated, a second major 3 month excavation followed in 1995.

The West Runton Elephant
Reconstruction by Sam Brown

Background
The 'West Runton Freshwater Bed' is a five-foot thick layer of organic-rich mud deposited by a medium sized river about six hundred thousand (600,000) to seven hundred thousand years ago, long before the beghinning of the Ice Ages. This deposit, just east of West Runton on the North Norfolk coast, is full of all sorts of fossils. These range from thousands of small snail shells, twigs and small mammal bones, through medium sized deer, horse and rhino bones to the huge bones of the elephants, which roamed our country in herds back then. There have been many species of elephant living in England over the last few millions of years. The West Runton Elephant, living here 6-700,000 years ago, is of the species Mammuthus trogontherii.



This was the largest species of elephant that has ever lived, and the largest animal ever to have lived on land except for the very biggest dinosaurs. Standing four metres high at its shoulder, it would have weighed about ten tons – twice the weight of any male African elephant you would find today. It is the largest elephant skeleton ever found and is the oldest elephant skeleton to have been found in the UK (some individual bones or teeth from elsewhere are older, but none make even a partial skeleton). The West Runton Elephant skeleton is also the best of this species ever to have been found. Previously the best were two partial skeletons, one in Germany and the other in Russia, both only about 10-15% complete. The WRE skeleton is about 85% complete.

This is a good sign for fossil collectors.
A stormy day and a high tide should clean
up the West Runton Freshwater Bed nicely,
freshly exposing another crop of fossils.

Because the West Runton Freshwater Bed is the “Type Site” for the Cromerian Interglacial it is the benchmark that all other countries in Europe use when studying their own deposits of a similar age. That is why when the first bones of the elephant were discovered after storms in the winters of 1990 and 1992, the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service applied for funding to excavate the site more fully to unearth the rest of what was obviously a very important find. It was clearly also a very good chance to study other aspects of the site in more detail. To find such a complete skeleton during the 1995 excavation, so well preserved and with so many other bones, was a very welcome surprise.br/>

Map showing the location of West Runton

Excavation
It was excavated over a three-month period by the Norfolk Archaeological Unit who paid meticulous attention to every detail when recording the remains of the animals and other fossils in the deposit. Not only were all of the bones carefully drawn and plotted on maps (using a laser-based theodolite) but specialists from all around the country and abroad came to collect pollen, macroflora, microfauna and sediments, and studied all aspects of the stratigraphy, mineralogy and chemistry of the site. Ten tonnes of soil were carefully removed a trowel-full at a time, to be sieved for the tiny bones of frogs, newts, lizards, snakes and small mammals and birds.

Finds
You can find on page three a list of all the animals that were found, many of which are now extinct - but some sound exotic, like rhinos, hyaenas, wolves and bears. Many people ask 'was the climate much warmer back then?' The answer is 'no', The climate was identical to what we have now. We know this from all the pollen studied and other clues such as the presence of amphibians, snails and small mammals that can only live within a narrow range of temperatures. The animals appear exotic to us now because since time of the West Runton Elephant we have suffered the effects of several ice ages that have reduced our species diversity, followed by a rise in sea levels making our country an island and creating a barrier to animals that might have re-colonised our land. Also, humankind arrived in the UK about 780,000 years ago and hunted some species to extinction over the same time period as the animals were feeling the stresses of the Ice Ages.

1 of 4 | Next

© NMAS | Conditions of use | Privacy policy | Glossary of terms | Contact us