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184 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 
ancient elephant, and to show that it was a 
creature adapted to withstand the northern 
cold and fitted for living on the branches of 
the birch and hemlock. 
The exact birthplace of the mammoth is as 
uncertain as that of many other great charac- 
ters; but his earliest known resting-place is in 
the Cromer Forest Beds of England, a country 
inhabited by him at a time when the German 
Ocean was dry land and Great Britain part of 
a peninsula. Here his remains are found to- 
day, while from the depths of the North Sea 
the hardy trawlers have dredged hundreds, aye 
thousands, of mammoth teeth in company with 
soles and turbot. If, then, the mammoth orig- 
ated in western Europe, and not in that great 
graveyard of fossil elephants, northern India, 
eastward he went spreading over all Europe 
north of the Pyrenees and Alps, save only 
Scandinavia, whose glaciers offered no attrac- 
tions, scattering his bones abundantly by the 
wayside to serve as marvels for future ages. 
Strange indeed have been some of the tales to 
which these and other elephantine remains 
have given rise when they came to light in the 
