Mammoth

Surely, the most impressive mammal of the last Ice Age was the woolly mammoth. Bones, molars and tusk fragments keep emerging during gravel quarrying operations along the Elbe. They indicate that mammoths were quite common in our region. They may have spent the short Ice Age summers in northern Germany, where the lush grassland served as pasture, then migrated southward in the autumn, where they may have weathered the hard winters in slightly more temperate areas. Mammoths lived in large parts of Europe, Asia, Africa and North Ameriabout They were exclusively herbivorous; their diet consisted entirely of grasses and bushes. They reached heights of up to three metres and thus stood about as tall as present-day African elephants, which are also their closest living relatives.