Geology Site Account

Historical site only

On 5th November 1906 staff at the Passmore Edwards Museum in Stratford were informed that a large bone had been unearthed during the construction of houses on the Kennedy Estate on the outskirts of Barking. The following day museum staff visited the excavation and collected the bone, which was described as two foot (70 centimetre) long and lying 3 feet 9 inches (1.15 metres) below the surface in a sandy gravel. The bone, which was in a very fragile state, was identified as part of the pelvis of a mammoth and was brought back to the museum in fragments where it was reassembled. Since the closure of the Passmore Edwards Museum in 1994 the bone has been in storage with the rest of the Essex Field Clubs collection.

It is difficult to estimate the age of the bone but the gravel here is part of the Taplow/Mucking terrace of the Thames and was laid down about 200,000 years ago (Marine Isotope Stages 8-6).

The finding of the bone is commemorated by a small stone plaque with the words Mammoth Cottages situated high on the wall of 20, Sparsholt Road, Barking.

The small, inconspicuous plaque on a group of cottages in Barking where a pelvis of a mammoth was found in 1906