The prehistoric beasts that roamed ancient Britain – including giant ‘Irish Elk’ with 12ft antlers and 13-ton elephants
IN the icy and swampy pasts of the ancient British Isles, colossal creatures were free to roam.
Much has changed in the millenniums since – with the largest wild mammal in the UK today being the 4ft tall red deer.
Woolly Rhino
A perhaps lesser known companion that lived alongside the Woolly Mammoth, and other ice animals in an ancient British Isles, was the Woolly Rhino.
It was during a time when the UK looked more like an Arctic tundra, than it does today – where temperatures often dropped as low as -22oC in winter, and summers topped 10oC on average.
Woolly rhinos used to roam the glaciers of Scotland and other parts of northern Europe, Africa and Asia..
These beasts were more than 11ft long, over 5ft tall, and weighed more than two tons.
They are believed to have been covered in long reddish-brown fur, and were hunted by early humans.
Scientists only know what woolly rhinos look like because of cave paintings; otherwise, there are only bones to go on.
Irish Elk
While today’s elk stand roughly 1.2m tall, their Pleistocene ancestor stood nearly double that.
The Megaloceros—an elk-like creature—towered over the ancient humans it lived alongside.
The long-extinct creature was roughly 6.5ft tall and adorned with 12ft antlers.
They would have thrived in the dense forests that blanketed the UK thousands of years ago.
The Irish Elk, or Megaloceros giganteus as it is formally known, likely incited both fear and intrigue in the early humans it shared the land with.
Giant deer drawings have been found on the walls of caves in what is now known as Southern France.
They roamed the ancient British Isles, and mainland Europe, for centuries.
The earliest fossil record of the giant deer is from 400,000 years ago, while the last fossil record is from 8,000 years ago.
Straight-tusked elephant
A warm ‘interglacial’ period roughly 700,000 years ago saw straight-tusked elephants inhabit mild-tempered forests in the UK.
Adult males could reach 13 feet at the shoulder and weighed around 13 tonnes.
They were one of the largest land mammals to have ever existed – and they were widespread during the Pleistocene era.
Four straight-tusked elephant remains have been found in Oxfordshire alone, dating back to between 500,000 and 125,000 years ago.
Polar bears
Polar bears may have also been on the prowl some 50,000 years ago, in an ancient Scotland – well before humans occupied the land.
Researchers, in 2023, found possible evidence that polar bears thrived in the region during the last Ice Age.
Remains found deep inside Inchnadamph’s ancient Bone Caves, in the limestone cliffs of Assynt, were previously thought to have belonged to these creatures.
But a reevaluation of the fossils by experts at the National Museums Scotland and universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh in 2023 noted they could belong to polar bears, or a sub-species of brown bear.
The animals’ diets were made up almost entirely of seafood – just like today’s polar bears.
“We have identified several samples which stick out like a sore thumb, both from the diets of other bears living in Scotland thousands of years ago and from what we’d expect of today’s brown bears,” Professor Kate Britton, from the University of Aberdeen, said at the time.
“Instead of consuming the meat of land-based animals, plants, or even a little salmon, like contemporary brown bears, these bears appear to have lived almost exclusively on seafood.”
Sea Crocodile
The sea crocodile was a prominent member of marine ecosystems from the Early Jurassic through the Early Cretaceous period.
A new genus and species of the Sea Crocodile that used to live in what is now the UK was discovered in 2023.
The newly-identified species, the 2metre-long Turnersuchus hingleyae, roamed UK waters some 185million years ago.
Less than ten species of Sea Crocodile are currently known from this time period.
While most specimens are found in Europe, specimens have also been found in China, Argentina, and Madagascar.
Thalattosuchians, and other crocodyliforms, appear abruptly in fossil records, suggesting rapid diversification during the Toarcian age, between 183 and 174 million years ago.