Quaternary Shropshire – The Condover Mammoth

It’s September 1986, and Eve Roberts from the village of Bayston Hill is walking her dogs around the edge of a gravel pit at Norton Farm, Condover when she noticed a large bone sticking out of a mound of clay & peat: the bone of a mammoth.

Eve Roberts then contacted the County Museum Service and the curator of the Ludlow Museum (John Norton) visited the site the next day and the two of them started to collect the bones. Professors Russell Coope and Adrian Lister examined these bones and determined that they came from an adult woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). With assistance from the pit owners (ARC) a team spent 18 months working through the spoil heaps and found the remains of an almost complete adult mammoth (minus skull and tail) and 3 juvenile mammoths.

All appeared to be in good health when they died. The area around the gravel pit used to be a kettle hole and it’s thought that the animals got stuck in the boggy ground in and round the hole before they died. The adult was about 3.4m tall, is thought to be a male and judging from the condition of its teeth about 30-32 years old. Of the 3 juveniles, an examination of the hip bones suggests one was female, one was male and third is uncertain. Radio carbon dating estimates that the animals died around 12,700 years ago, making them the youngest mammoths found in the British Isles.

The kettle whole that the mammoths were found in was about 7m deep. It had steep sand & gravel sides (around 40 degrees) and it is thought that is was these steep sides that trapped the animals. There were several layers of clay in the whole; a pinkish, laminated clay that was 4m thick from the base of the hole, a 1m thick layer of blue-grey clay, then 2m of green-grey clay and peat. Although the mammoth bones were not found in situ, they were covered in blue-grey clay and thought to have come from that layer. The clay also contained the remains of insects and plants showing that the local environment was a tundra.

Some of the remains of these mammoths are on display at the Shrewsbury Museum and a full sized replica can be seen at the Shropshire Hill’s Discovery Centre.