National Museums Scotland presents Mammoths of the Ice Age, a major exhibition exploring the mysteries of the Ice Age and revealing what life was like for the iconic mammals of this era; the mammoth and the mastodon.
The Edinburgh Reporter was at the press view yesterday to find out more:-
Unlike dinosaurs and other prehistoric mammals, mammoths and mastodons lived side by side with humans for thousands of years. In Mammoths of the Ice Age visitors can again come nose-to-trunk with these intriguing animals.
The exhibition travels to the National Museum of Scotland from The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. An extensive collection of significant objects from the Ice Age will be brought together for the first time in Europe, from some of the oldest human art in existence to woolly mammoth hair, which could grow up to a metre long, preserved Columbian mammoth dung and giant tusks and teeth.
Visitors will be able to see and touch the biggest and smallest mammoths that ever lived. An imposing full-scale replica of a Columbian mammoth, which would have stood around 4 metres tall, will dwarf its much smaller cousin which lived on the remote Wrangel Island in the Arctic Sea, where the last mammoths survived on Earth only 4,000 years ago.
Also on display is an exact replica of Lyuba, the 40,000-year old baby mammoth who was found in 2007 by a Siberian reindeer herder and two of his sons. She is the best-preserved mammoth ever discovered, with most of her features intact, providing great insights into how mammoths lived.
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