What an amazing catch. With so few fish left, the fishing fleets may even make more money selling these bones.
A dozen white, plastic fish boxes stand jumbled on the floor of a former fish-gutting plant in the pretty town of Urk in the northern Netherlands. Each box overflows with what appear to be large, serrated pebbles or small serrated boulders. In fact, they are the fossilised teeth of mammoths. Some are as big as melons. Others are the size of cricket balls – the molars of baby mammoths, which died prematurely from hunger, or the claws and fangs of a predator, 40,000 years ago.
All around is a prehistoric boneyard. Propped against the walls are immense, curved mammoth tusks or mammoth thigh bones, five feet high. On the shelves are fragments of the jaw bone of a woolly rhinoceros and the skull and horns of a 10,000-year-old, extinct species of giant bison.
All have been scooped accidentally from the bed of the North Sea by Dutch beam trawlers in the last few months. Most are destined to be sold on to specialist sites on the internet.
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