Mammoth new discovery on beach

MORE parts of a massive mammoth which used to live where Felixstowe stands today have been washed up on the resort's shores.

MORE parts of a massive mammoth which used to live where Felixstowe stands today have been washed up on the resort's shores.

The great woolly beast one was one of many which would have scavenged for food on the land between Britain and Europe before the North Sea swept through and separated them.

Beachcomber Clive Bamberger was walking at Landguard when he found a fossilised tooth on the sand between the high and low water marks.

A neighbour of his has since found part of a tusk just feet from where he found the tooth, and another person has turned up two teeth, one fossil remarkably showing the tooth's roots.

“I think the teeth come from a calf as they are smaller than you would probably expect for a full-grown mammoth,” said Mr Bamberger, who runs Saxon Upholstery, Hamilton Road, Felixstowe.

“The tusk is part of where it would have started to curve - some tusks were 16ft long - and is probably from a different animal.

“It is amazing to think these creatures were wandering around here hundreds of thousands of years ago and how different this whole area would have been at that time.”

Mammoths lived between 120,000 and 8,000 years ago, disappearing after the end of the ice age. Some scientists believe they were hunted to extinction by man, others that they died from disease or climate change.

Over the years Mr Bamberger has also found around 200 shark's teeth on the beaches - the largest belonging to a megalodon, which became extinct around 1.5 million years ago and is the largest flesh-eating fish ever to have existed - which he has now donated to the Felixstowe Museum.

Have you found anything interesting on Suffolk's shores? Write to Your Letters, Evening Star, 30 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich, IP4 1AN, or e-mail eveningstarletters@eveningstar.co.uk