It turned out that the bones had been found while laying a sewage pipe for a new house on Finnøy. After a closer look, Thomsen and her colleagues at the Museum of Archaeology realised that they must be the remains of a polar bear-a very old polar bear. Purely by chance, she found herself in possession of a box of big old bones. The wonderfully preserved polar bear skeleton was found under the floor of a basement laundry room on Finnøy in Ryfylke.Īt that time, Hanne Thomsen was employed as a quaternary geologist at the Museum of Archaeology in Stavanger. It was probably among the very last of its kind along the Norwegian coast. The Finnøy Polar Bear was 28 years old, weighed about 600 kilos and lived in Rogaland at the end of the Ice Age. Now, the Finnøy Polar Bear is on display in its own room in the exhibitions at the Museum of Archaeology in Stavanger. The skeleton of the Finnøy Polar Bear is the most complete discovery ever made of a polar bear from the Ice Age. Some 12,400 years later, the skeleton of that same polar bear is discovered under a basement floor in the village of Judaberg on Finnøy. A polar bear embarks on a long swim through the icy waters and never reaches land. The sea is 40 metres above the current level. Much of Norway is covered with ice and the present-day island of Finnøy exists as only two small islets. “Imagine you are 12,400 years in the past. The Norwegian island of Finnøy is shown below (magenta circle, far left) Stavanger is just southwest of that location in southern Norway:įrom the University of Stravanger press release ( courtesy ), my bold: This specimen was described in my research paper, Annotated Map of Ancient Polar Bear Remains of the World (Crockford 2012), which shows how many very early Holocene remains have been found outside current polar bear range. A press release issued yesterday (23 January 2018) by the University of Stavanger tells the story of decades of work on the most complete ancient polar bear skeleton in the world, found in 1976 in southern Norway, that culminated in an articulated museum display.
0 kommentar(er)
