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A German holidaymaker made an amazing discovery while walking on the beach in the Netherlands. Facebook users have suspicions.
The Hague – It's not just in Bavaria that unexpected finds surprise day-trippers on a walk through nature. These also occur on the beaches of the North and Baltic Sea coasts. Now a walker on the beach in The Hague, Netherlands, has come across a sensational find. There the waves of the North Sea had washed an object onto the beach, which the astonished finder documented with a series of photos.
North Sea find: Amazed walker shares photos of the mysterious object on Facebook
Overwhelmed by her discovery and at the same time at a loss as to what the seemingly petrified object could be, the walker immediately turned to her feet Facebook to other users of the platform. Hoping someone knows something about the origin of the strange object.
In a post, the finder asks the Facebook community in the group “Beach Finds: Sea Glass, Fossils, Stones and the Sea” the following: “Hello everyone, we found this on the beach. Looks like a big tooth. Does anyone perhaps know what it is? A pen for size comparison.”
Attached to the appeal are three photos of the object found: They show a seemingly petrified object that appears to resemble a huge tooth. On the top of the heavy-looking fossil there are also uniformly shaped lines of a darker color that look like leathery skin or something similar.
Does the sensational find belong to a horse, whale or a completely different animal?
In the Facebook group “Beach Finds: Sea Glass, Fossils, Stones and the Sea,” the photos of the find are prompting many users to eagerly guess what the mysterious object might be. However, the community seems to quickly agree on one aspect: namely, that the find must be the tooth of a large animal.
A Facebook user wonders whether it could be a “horse tooth”. Others even suspect significantly larger animals. “It looks like a whale’s tooth,” said another Facebook user.
Find could belong to a prehistoric earth inhabitant – the woolly mammoth
Still other users are certain that the object found could be the tooth of an animal that populated the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. And which has been extinct for just as long. “Definitely ice age and mammoth tooth,” says one user. Something like that is “extremely unusual as a beach find, you don’t really find anything like that there,” he adds.
A little later, a Facebook user with paleontological expertise confirmed her suspicions about which animal the gigantic fossil tooth could belong to: the object found was a “multi-rooted molar (molar tooth) of a woolly mammoth.”
At the same time, she congratulates the walker on her astonishing find: It is a “great and sensational find,” she explains. And that you probably only find something like this once in your life, if at all. Another Facebook user is also sure: This is a “once-in-a-lifetime find.” And others are already sure that the walker came across the “find of the year” on her trip to the beach.
Recently another woman shared their mysterious find on the Internet – Facebook users celebrated the “Chicken God.“
Woolly mammoths lived on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago
It is assumed that woolly mammoths developed during the transition from the Early to Middle Pleistocene around 800,000 to 600,000 years ago. Dem NABU According to this, they mainly inhabited steppes in Siberia, northern Eurasia and North America.
![This is what it might have looked like: The woolly mammoth that populated the Earth in the Pleistocene epoch thousands of years ago. Here it can be seen in the form of a replica in the Museum of Paleontological Art in Montignac in the Dordogne (France).](https://www.merkur.de/assets/images/34/278/34278301-wollhaarmammut-pleistozaen-replik-montignac-dordogne-2nKsYN0yDzBG.jpg)
However, woolly mammoths were apparently not as huge as is often assumed. Adult animals reached a height of 2.8 meters to 3.75 meters at the withers – making them hardly larger than many of today's elephant species. The discovery of a comparably small woolly mammoth in Rottweil, Baden-Württemberg, was only 2.5 meters high.
At the end of the Pleistocene, i.e. up to 10,000 years before the present era, the woolly mammoth became extinct in large parts of its range. However, it is said to have continued to live regionally in some remaining populations until the middle Holocene around 3700 years ago.
What happens next with the sensational beach find?
But what will the lucky walker do with her sensational find? The Facebook user with paleontological knowledge also has some advice on this question: “Offer it to a museum in Findland so that countless people can marvel at this find.”
Another user, meanwhile, strongly advises against simply leaving the mammoth tooth in the open air without being treated. As the user explains, the fossil object could start to crumble over time.
Meanwhile, the finder emphasizes that she doesn't want to touch her amazing find herself anyway: “Well, I don't plan on doing anything with it myself. “I’ll just contact Senckenberg or the University of Marburg,” she explains. (fh)
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