December 2002

Woolly rhino under geographer's scrutiny

A Royal Holloway geographer is one of the team investigating the Staffordshire quarry site where ancient rhino remains were unearthed last month.

Dr Danielle Schreve, of the Department of Geography, has been taking part in the excavation of a woolly rhinoceros and other Ice-Age fossils in the West Midlands, which represent some of the most significant finds in Britain since the 1960s.

Last Ice-Age woolly rhinoceros remains from the Lafarge Alrewas quarry, Whitemoor Haye, Staffordshire. Photo: Gary Coates, University of Birmingham

The skull and other bones were collected by the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit and are now being studied by Dr Schreve in collaboration with Andy Currant of the Natural History Museum, London. The bones are exceptionally well-preserved and appear to represent a frozen carcass that was buried swiftly after the death of the animal. Remains of the animal's final meal, in the form of plant debris, are still preserved within the teeth. When alive, the rhino would have weighed about 1.5-2 tons and had two large horns on its nose, the front one up to 1.5 metres long. Woolly rhino horns are made of compacted hair and do not usually preserve as fossils but examples have occasionally been found intact in the frozen ground of Siberia.

The finding of a partial skeleton is extremely unusual. Although woolly rhinos were fairly common in Britain during the last Ice Age, their remains are almost invariably either badly damaged by surface abrasion in river deposits or heavily gnawed by spotted hyaenas. On the strength of these preliminary findings, a grant for over £15 000 was obtained from English Nature's Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund for a rescue excavation, which took place in the last week of October. The funding also permitted the sediments themselves to be studied in greater detail and to be dated using optically-stimulated luminescence. Although the investigations failed to locate the back half of the first woolly rhino skeleton, a further three rhino skulls and other bones came to light, along with remains of woolly mammoth, horse, bison, reindeer and wolf. In addition, well-preserved insect and plant macrofossil remains were also collected. The original rhino is now at the Natural History Museum where the bones will be conserved by the staff of the Palaeontology Conservation Unit before being subjected to radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis, stable isotope and other dietary analyses.

The discovery and subsequent work were widely reported in the regional, national and international press last week. Dr Schreve was interviewed for the 1 o'clock and 6 o'clock national news from the BBC, by News 24, by Midlands Today (BBC regional news) and by BBC radio, among others.

It is hoped that the remains will eventually be displayed at the Museum in a new temporary exhibition.

Danielle Schreve and Andy Currant of the Natural History Museum (right) collecting bones at Whitemoor Haye

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