Remains of Ice Age rhinoceros unearthed at Gloucestershire water park
A five-year-old girl at a Gloucestershire water park has unearthed the remains of an Ice Age rhinoceros, which roamed the area about 50,000 years ago.
According to a report by BBC News, Emelia Fawbert, the girl in question, found the
fossilized carcass at the Cotswold Water Park near Cirencester during a fossil hunt.
Emelia was among a group of fossil hunters searching a freshly-excavated gravel pit at the park.
Emelia and her father James, from Bussage, near Stroud, dug up the atlas vertebra of the woolly rhino, which roamed the area about 50,000 years ago.
The atlas vertebra, which once supported the head of the animal had been sticking up through the clay which was exposed by the
gravel excavations.
The pair used a trowel to dig the bone from the mud. It has now been sealed in a special protective covering before being donated to a museum.
The hunt, involving 75 people, also unearthed the leg bone and vertebra from an Ice Age deer and belemnites, the remains of squid-like creatures from the Jurassic period, some 150 million years ago.
Emelia, who wants to become a palaeontologist, had joined the fossil hunt for the first time.
It was organized by the Cotswold Water Park Society and led by Swindon palaeontologist Dr Neville Hollingworth who also found the remains of a woolly rhinoceros in a gravel pit near Swindon in 2004.