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There are still plenty of things buried out there and just waiting to be discovered.

The skull of an ancient woolly mammoth was discovered in Wiltshire -in January 2004. It was unearthed after bones were spotted sticking out of a working gravel pit at the Cotswold Water Park.

Fossil experts went to the site to investigate and were amazed when they realised it was a complete mammoth skull. The skull was only the second to be discovered in Britain. The other was found in the 19th century in Ilford, Essex.

The woolly mammoth’s skull took seven hours to dig out and needed four people to carry it! It could be anything from 50,000 to 240,000 years old. The skull is believed to have been from a female aged between 25 and 40. It measures about a metre by a metre-and-a-half, weighs about 100kgs, and still contains some teeth.

Scientists think it’s so well preserved because it got buried really rapidly. The skulls are made of very thin, but strong bone and once the animal dies they break off easily.

The spectacular find should teach us a lot about the lifestyle of these huge animals. Woolly mammoths lived from the Pleistocene to the early Holocene period, -from about 120,000 to 4,000 years ago.

They appear in cave paintings in France and Spain. They were herbivorous and are closely related to modern Indian elephants.

They probably became extinct because they couldn’t adapt to the combined pressures of the climatic warming at the end of the Ice Age and being hunted by humans.