For something entirely different from the usual fare on my website: seven photos of… something. What do you think it is? Click (more…) to see the other photos. The answer can be found at the end of the post.

The answer: it is a mammoth tooth! To be more precise: a molar. Found more than ten years ago, accidently, at the beach here in the Netherlands. We were told by people at the museum that the tooth once belonged to a young, not yet full grown, mammoth. According to the well-known and much acclaimed scholar Mr. Wikipedia, the tooth must be at least 4500 years old as mammoths roamed this earth “from the Pliocene Epoch from around 4.8 million years ago, into the Holocene at about 4,500 years ago”. Interestingly, as reported by Wikipedia, currently an experiment is underway in Japan to produce a mammoth embryo by cloning DNA that has been preserved in the Russian permafrost. Bringing a mammoth ‘back to life’: Jurassic Park for mammoths?