Giant mammal's bone from quarry donated to museum

Museum curators said the bone had been sitting in a shed for about 20 years

An ancient animal bone discovered in a quarry about 20 years ago has been donated to a museum.

The bone from a palaeoloxodon - an extinct animal also known as a straight-tusked elephant which is believed to be the largest ever land mammal – is now on display in Chatteris Museum, Cambridgeshire.

The football-size specimen is thought to be 20,000-40,000 years old and was part of the upper front leg of the animal.

Andrew Spooner, museum collections manager, said: "It arrived in a cardboard box wrapped in bubble wrap; it'd been in a shed for about 20 years."

A restored skeleton of a Palaeoloxodon naumanni on display at Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science

Andrew Spooner from Chatteris Museum said the bone was "remarkably light"

The bone was discovered by a maintenance worker at a gravel pit between Chatteris and Somersham.

He noticed an unusual object on the conveyor belt and realised it was a bone, the museum said.

"It has a fine, quite dense, bone structure," said Mr Spooner.

"It is remarkably light."

Straight-tusked elephants were four metres high, bigger than woolly mammoths, and were present in what is now Cambridgeshire in the last two ice ages.

The bone is now on display in the museum's new collections cabinet

Amalia Robertson, a resident palaeontologist, said she was "very happy and excited" by the donation.

She said the elephants lived until the last Ice Age. Modern African elephants can grow up to 3.3m (11ft) tall at the shoulder, whereas the palaeoloxodon could reach up to 4.5m (15ft).

"This elephant would've lived in a very mild wooded habitat in this area.

"The final cold snap of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago would've wiped them all out."