A fossil hunter has discovered a mammoth tusk that is believed to be more than 400,000 years old sticking out of a rocky quarry in east England.
"I couldn't believe it," Jamie Jordan, the founder and curator of Fossils Galore, a fossil museum in England, told Live Science."It's something that you don't expect to find. Normally you see on TV… or you see in books, where someone's come across a tusk just laying there … and lo and behold, it happened to me."
These behemoths wandered Asia and eventually Europe and North America around 1.8 million to 200,000 years ago, during the icy early and middle Pleistocene. They were the ancestors of woolly mammoths — the last species of mammoth to exist. However, the newly found tusk is much better preserved than their last discovery, likely because the quarry was flooded for a few years when it was dug up, then recently drained, which kept the fossil from drying out and crumbling, Jordan said.