Station: [24] The Ice Ages

Over the past 50 million years, the Earth’s climate cooled significantly. Finally, between two and three million years ago, massive glaciations occurred in the Arctic Ocean and on the adjacent continental land masses to the south on both sides of the Atlantic. Several times during especially cold phases, the ice extended from Scandinavia across the Baltic region to central Germany. The last ice age peaked just 20,000 years ago.

During the glacial periods, the biome in Central Europe was predominantly tundra. During the extreme phases, there were no forests, just a landscape of herbage and shrubs. The soil thawed only superficially, with deeper layers remaining frozen even during the summers. But many large mammals had adapted to the inhospitable tundra ecosystems of this period: mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, giant deer, horses, sabre-toothed cats, cave lions, cave bears and hyenas.

The display case features a typical canine from a sabre-toothed cat, some molars and a tusk fragment from mammoths and the enormous skull of a woolly rhinoceros. Like mammoths, woolly rhinos had long, shaggy hides and were well protected from the cold. From the broad, abraded crowns of their molars, we know that they were herbivores. Their horns were extremely long, up to a metre or over three feet in length. But though the horns looked dangerous in side view, they were very slender, hardly suitable for fighting or as a means of defence. Woolly rhinos are thought to have used the horn to clear the snow and gain easier access to food.

Towards the end of the last glacial period, many of the typical ice-age megafauna species became extinct. Since modern humans were already making their presence felt in the cold regions and hunting those large mammals, they may have contributed to the latter’s extinction.