The last million years in Worcestershire has been marked by an amazing diversity of animals, big and minor, as the climate fluctuated between icy glacials and warmer interglacials. Equally temperatures rose species were able to expand into new areas, before beingness pushed back farther south equally the climate turned colder.

Temperate times

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Bison once made their domicile in Worcestershire – image created past Pighill Reconstruction.

During warm interglacials, herds of horses, bison and aurochs would have roamed the open up grasslands of Britain. Beavers and dolphins swam in our rivers; at the height of the Hoxnian Interglacial (around 400,000 years ago) oak forests were home to deer and macaque monkeys.

Lions, bears, wolves and early humans would accept hunted big animals similar rhinoceros and the straight tusked elephant. Straight tusked elephants are at present extinct just they were one time the largest Ice Age animate being of all, twice every bit large equally elephants today and even bigger than a mammoth. They could grow to four metres in height, ten tonnes in weight and their straight tusks could grow to over three metres in length.

Around 130,000 – 115,000 years ago, a particularly warm interglacial allowed tropical species to alive in Britain. Hippopotamus bones have been constitute in Worcestershire at Eckington, Bengeworth and Stourbridge. Spotted hyenas, lions and narrow-nosed rhino are also known to accept lived in Britain during this time.

Icy spells

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Reconstruction of a woolly rhino – image created by Pighill Reconstruction.

In comparison, glacial Worcestershire was populated past animals suited to common cold, chill conditions. With the exception of the brutally cold Anglian glaciation around 480,000 years ago – when two-thirds of Britain was under several hundred meters of water ice – plants and animals were able to alive and thrive here during glacial periods. Animals like the woolly rhinoceros, bison, musk ox, reindeer and the Irish gaelic elk, which had the largest antlers of any fauna that ever lived (three and a one-half metres from tip to tip), were all residents of snowy Ice Age landscapes.

However, information technology is the mammoth that is the best known of all Ice Historic period glacial animals. Early ancestral mammoths commencement came into Europe around three million years ago, followed by the steppe mammoth, which lived until about 400,000 years ago, then finally the woolly mammoth. This last, nigh well known species of mammoth could grow to over three metres in height and weighed six tonnes. Their tusks are known to take reached ii and a half metres in length and, simply like a tree, would grow every yr in rings.  To insulate them from the icy weather condition, their coats consisted of a brusque underlayer covered by an overcoat of longer guard hairs.

But the story of Worcestershire'southward Water ice Age animals is not quite every bit clear cut as it first appears. 'Millicent' mammoth, discovered in 1990 at Strensham Service along the M5, was plant in with deposits containing cold-adverse mollusc species; showing Millicent lived in open grassland with a climate like to Uk'southward today. Whilst we tend to pic mammoths walking beyond deep snow, they could survive in more temperate climes – to a bespeak. As the world began to warm up afterwards the final glacial, which reached its peak around 21,000 years ago, the habitat and numbers of mammoths and other Ice Age animals dwindled. Human being hunters further reduced these populations. The very last mammoths known in Northern Europe were found in 1986 at Condover, Shropshire. They died 14,000 years ago.

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