West Runton Mammoth

[2] Following a stormy night on 13 December 1990, local residents found that a large bone had been partially exposed at the base of the cliffs in the Cromer Forest Bed.

After another storm just over a year later, a local fossil hunter discovered more and in January 1992 the Norfolk Archaeological Unit undertook an exploratory excavation at the site.

[2] At the conservation laboratory at Gressenhall, the examination process revealed that the carcass of the mammoth had been scavenged by spotted hyenas (shown by the teeth marks found on the bones).

[2] Study of the pollen, amphibians, snails and small mammals from the site suggest that the landscape consisted of bodies of slow moving fresh water near to the sea, with a good amount of vegetation and moist woodland present.

On 30 March 2011, it was reported in the news that researchers from the Universities of York and Manchester had successfully extracted protein from the bones of the West Runton Mammoth.

Although shorter peptides (chains of amino acids) have been allegedly reported from dinosaur fossils, this is arguably the oldest protein ever sequenced.

Despite the age of the fossil, sufficient peptides were obtained from the West Runton skeleton to identify it as part of the elephantidae family, which includes elephants and mammoths.