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Woolly mammoths are extinct relatives
of Asian elephants, but closer in size to African elephants. They are between 2.8
and four meters in height, and weigh between six to eight tons.
They need a lot of food to feed this bulk, and its thought they
fed between 16 to 20 hours a day. They first arrived in Europe
in the Ice Age between 190 and 130 thousand years ago,
during a time known as the pleistocene epoch. Recent work on mammoths has
shown they were in England around fourteen thousand years ago.
Woolly mammoths were well adapted to the cold weather.
In addition to a thick, hairy coat and a
woolly soft undercoat they had a ten centimetre
layer of fat. They also had small ears
lined with fur and a small tail to help reduce heat lost.
The tusks of mammoths were a lot longer and more curved than
modern elephants, the largest was about 4 meters long
and one found in Hampshire was about 2.2 meters long.
They were used in fighting and also to help them dig for
food in deep snow. Mammoths had four molars
in their jaw at one time, they had lots of groves in them
and a large grinding edge because they had to grind up grasses
and other vegetation. In all they had about six sets of teeth
in their lifetime as one tooth bore down
another was there to replace it. About 21,000 years ago
the climate started to warm up, forests began to grow and spread
and the grassland began to disappear. Initially mammoths went north
to find more food but eventually they became extinct.