page_title: Schöningen forest elephant
section_title: Research
hierarchical_section_title: Schöningen forest elephant / Research
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Restaurierung eines Backenzahn des Waldelefanten von Schöningen im Forschungsmuseum Schöningen
context_page_description: The Schöningen forest elephant is a set of fossil remains of a European forest elephant that lived around 300,000 years ago. The almost complete skeleton of the animal was discovered in Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany. It was found during archaeological investigations in an excavation site in the Schöningen opencast mine.
context_section_description: After the discovery of the forest elephant at Schöningen in September 2017, the exposure took almost two years. It was carried out by archaeologists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen in cooperation with the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation. The scientists announced the discovery publicly in May 2020 at a press conference with the Lower Saxony Minister of Science Björn Thümler in Schöningen. At that point in time, the examination and conservation of the bones had not yet been completed. That took place in the Schöningen Research Museum, which was directly connected to the excavations and is about 300 meters away from the site.
  The fossils of at least ten forest elephants have been found in the Schöningen opencast mine since the excavations began in the 1980s. These were individual finds of ribs, tusks or vertebrae that had to be hurriedly recovered from the approaching bucket wheel excavator during rescue excavations. The forest elephant discovered by Schöningen in 2017 is the only almost completely preserved skeleton. Since the site is in the open-cast mining area on the preserved spear base, the recovery took place without time pressure in close consultation with the conservation workshop of the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation. Further analyzes of the environmental and climatic conditions at the time of death of the animal, as well as the sedimentation processes of the former lake, are carried out by the Technical University of Braunschweig, the University of Lüneburg and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. These sediment samples were analyzed for micro-fauna, micro-morphology, Limnology and Paleobotany.
  Due to the findings of elephant bones in the open pit, the life-size replica of a European forest elephant was erected above Schöningen in 2018. It stands on the edge of the Elm forest next to an excursion restaurant and is also used for tourist purposes. The reconstruction was made on the basis of a skeleton found at the Neumark-Nord site in Geisel valley, Saxony-Anhalt.
  For the year 2022, the President of the Lower Saxony State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, Christina Krafczyk, announced an exhibition with a focus on European forest elephants at the Schöningen Research Museum.
caption: Conservation of a molar of the forest elephant in the Schöningen research museum
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