What is the North Sea's Fossil Treasure Trove?

[Andre]

Every now and then fishermen, trawling the floor of the North Sea for sole and plaice find things like this in their trawler nets:

http://i.pbase.com/g1/04/469504/2/97590821.Hj6ZrhEI.jpg

It's the skull and antlers of a giant deer or irish elk, which was originally thought to have died out at the end of the Pleistocene, together with the mammoths, mastodons, etc, some 11,000 years ago. However a http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_giant_deer.html proofs this to be false.

The guy on the picture is Dick http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_giant_deer.html Mol, who is currently packing his bags for a expedition to Siberia to investigate another stunning discovery that will likely hit the news later.

The likely age range of this fossil is 28-35,000 years, alternately it could be 6000-11,000 years, as not a single fossil is known here between those two periods. Older is unlikely or the specimen would have been (partly) mineralized. Of course carbon dating is in progress.

The house in the background is of one of those fishermen, also the owner of this fossil, in his rooms he has one of the finest private paleonthologic collections, only surpassed by that of Dick Mol, whose house is completely full whenever a visitor happens to pass by.

 

[Borek]

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /g1/04/469504/2/97590821.Hj6ZrhEI.jpg on this server.

Could be that's just me.

 

[Andre]

Perhaps. It's working fine for me. I uploaded a small version,

 

[Evo]

I could't access the link either.

 

[Andre]

Too bad.

Perhaps this page works?

http://www.pbase.com/ebax/stellendamnhr

 

[Borek]

Much better now :)

 

[Andre]

Okay,

A recent abstract for Dutch article by Dick Mol that I translated:

A new fossil of the Mastodon of Aubergine (Anancus arvernensis Croizet et Jobert, 1828) has recently been recovered from the North Sea floor by the crew of the trawler OD6. It was collected in January 2008. It is a lower jaw molar, a dp4, which is a last milk molar. It is presently in the collection of Kommer Tanis, Havenhoofd, Stellendam, The Netherlands, labeled as number 3152. This is the first time that this proboscidean has shown up in this section of the North Sea, known as the Southern Bight. Mastodon remains such as this, from the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene, are relatively rare in North West Europe. Some are known from the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands finding places are Tegelen, Mill, Liessel and the Oosterschelde. In this paper, I present an overview of the five specimens of Anancus arvernensis known from the North Sea.