Mammoth tooth Mammuthus primigenius, North Sea / Netherlands, Pleistocene (20,000 years old), on custom-made base, h. 31 cm

The woolly mammoth was the largest animal on the grassy steppe during the Ice Age, although approximately the size of a modern-day Asian elephant, it owes its name to its coarse winter coat of long hair. The mammoth had four molars. When the tooth wore out, it fragmented and made way for a new one that had developed slightly further back. The mammoth thus had six sets of molars. When the last one broke off, the animal could no longer feed itself and ended up starving to death, like today's elephants.