The lumbering hulk of a prehistoric mammoth recently walked along a beach in the Norfolk region of the United Kingdom for the first time in about 700,000 years. But it wasn't from time travel or a movie's special effects. Instead, the replica mammoth was made of an open wooden frame whose pieces were glued together and whose joints operated by steel hinges. The trunk was formed from pieces of plastic signs separated by foam that "allowed the trunk to swing and move about in the wind in a quite naturalistic way," explains Jeremy Moore, the aeronautics engineer, firefighter, and restorer of vintage aircraft who designed and constructed the replica. Moore built the beast primarily as a favor for a friend, Suzie Lay, an events coordinator at a local museum who hoped to raise awareness of the so-called West Runton elephant. The subfossil skeleton, which was 85 percent complete, of a beast of the species Mam-muthm trogontherii, or steppe mammoth, was discovered in the region in 1990 and excavated in 1995 but has not yet been put on public display. The mammoth stood 4 m tall at its shoulders and weighed roughly 10 metric tons.
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