Een bijzondere mammoetschedel uit Valburg

This article deals with a skull of the Late Pleistocene woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius. The specimen includes the lower jaw and is almost complete. It was dredged from a gravel-pit at Valburg (Province of Gelderland, The Netherlands) in the late sixties. The molars in the upper and lower jaw (M3 sin. and dext., M3 dext.) show that we are dealing with the skull of a senile invidual. Age assessment according to the criteria set up by Laws (1966) gives 53 (± 2) AEY (African Elephant Years). The dentition is anomalous: the M3 in the left lower jaw is missing. As its alveolus is worn and the crown of the upper M3 sin. is considerably higher than that of the M3 dext. (the difference is 110 mm), it follows that the left lower M3 was lost in vivo. The skull is in the collection of the Geologische Arbeitsgemeinschaft at Kleve (GFR) and exhibited at the 'Schwanenturm' Geological Museum at that town.