Ice Age in NRW: Mammoth and hippopotamus within the Rhine: Look concerning the Ice Age in NRW | EUROtoday

Ice, snow and frosty wind in every single place – and in the midst of all of it a number of big, lonely animals with shaggy fur – that is what laypeople think about Ice Age nicely over two million years in the past. A brand new Ice Age exhibition within the Ruhr Museum in Essen reveals that clichés from movies like “Ice Age” have little to do with actuality.

Under the motto “Survival in the Ice Age”, the museum presents greater than 350 displays, animations of Ice Age landscapes, lifelike animal sculptures and a few well-known displays within the former coal wash of the Zollverein Coal Mine. The exhibition runs till January 10, 2027.

Granite boulders are over a billion years outdated

Highlights embody the cranium of a mammoth with tusks, found in Haltern in 1975, and the well-known decrease jaw of a human, which was present in Mauer close to Heidelberg and gave your entire human species the title Homo heidelbergensis. A granite boulder that’s over a billion years outdated and was pushed by glaciers from Finland to what’s now the Ruhr space might set off a chill from the previous.

There had been really chilly phases through the Ice Age by which the north of North Rhine-Westphalia was lined with an ice sheet over 100 meters thick, says museum vp Dietmar Osses. But they alternated with heat intervals by which RheinLippe and Ems forests, floodplains and moors emerged and heat-loving animals such because the wooden rhinoceros and the hippopotamus populated what’s now North Rhine-Westphalia.

Did hippos bathe within the Rhine?

“Perhaps hippos even bathed in the Rhine,” mentioned Osses. Climate modifications have taken place over a number of thousand years, however they nonetheless require monumental adaptation efforts from crops, animals and people.

Not all species survived the modified residing situations – not even among the many individuals who lived on the Rhine and Ruhr for round 350,000 years, because the exhibition reveals. Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals died out, solely anatomically fashionable people survived. Osses mentioned he gained benefits by utilizing instruments, clothes and cultural strategies, for instance when looking.

Nuclear weapon on the finish: Is there a risk of a brand new ice age?

At the top of the tour, the exhibition attracts a line into fashionable occasions: the exhibition organizers current the just about four-meter-long casing of a nuclear weapon from the Cold War, and behind a seating space you may learn on the wall the ultimate declaration of the Paris Climate Protection Conference, with which the world dedicated itself to limiting world warming.

“Humanity can bring about a new ice age with atomic bombs,” says Osses. “And when it comes to the climate, we are at a tipping point.” If all of the ice on earth melts, world water ranges will rise by 80 meters. “Cologne, Bonn and Düsseldorf will then be under water.”

The “Monster of Minden” and the “Kervenheim Whale”

The exhibition is a part of a collection on earth historical past North Rhine-Westphaliawhich was initiated by the NRW Ministry of Home Affairs and is funded with 1.5 million euros. In July, an exhibition with traces of extinct dinosaurs will observe on the LWL Natural History Museum in Münster. On show there may be the “Monster of Minden”, a 163 million 12 months outdated predatory dinosaur whose stays had been discovered within the Wiehengebirge between Porta Westfalica and the Osnabrück area.

The third exhibition begins in September within the Lippe State Museum in Detmold and focuses on the time when a heat shallow sea lined prehistoric North Rhine-Westphalia. You can see, for instance, the roughly 6.5 meter lengthy prehistoric “Kervenheim whale” present in Kevelaer on the Lower Rhine in 1987 – proof that the area was additionally lined by the ocean at occasions.

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