Hair-raising sight in the Grassmarket

PLODDING through what is now the Grassmarket, the giant woolly mammoth stops still, dips his long tusks into the icy ground and shovels up some tasty vegetation for lunch.

Munching slowly on his find, he takes a look around and surveys his surroundings, before moving on again, slowly making his way through an area which is unrecognisable from its developed, bustling 21st century form.

It is the Ice Age and woolly mammoths are a familiar sight across the area which will later be known as Edinburgh and the Lothians.

There are no shops, or pubs, no nearby tram works and no humans to get in their way.

The area is their own and their gigantic hairy forms are as common as today's tourists and shoppers.

Fans of the animated Ice Age films will be familiar with woolly mammoths, having followed the adventures of the loveable Manny and Ellie over the years.

The mammoth couple will return to the big screen again in the latest offering released this week.

But Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs has already stirred up controversy among paleontologists and will have them shouting at cinema screens in anger.

Their complaint is that while mammoths like Manny and Ellie lived through the Ice Age, dinosaurs did not exist during the same period – unlike in the movie.

While Hollywood has used plenty of artistic licence to bring dinosaurs to the Ice Age, the seemingly far-fetched notion of mighty, prehistoric beasts roaming the Lothians before humans had made their mark on the land is no work of fiction.

This week, a BBC exhibition in Glasgow will give audiences from across Scotland a glimpse of what local life during the time of dinosaurs may have been like, bringing the acclaimed Walking with Dinosaurs production to the city.

The show will fill the SECC with life-size models of dinosaurs, including a terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Although it is accepted that dinosaurs lived in Scotland in the Mesozoic era – some 250 million years ago – evidence of their existence, and how and where they lived in the Lothians, is patchy.

It is believed that dinosaurs may have thrived here, roaming on Arthur's Seat and other areas of high land as they did in England and other parts of Scotland.

This was certainly an idea that captured the imagination of Arthur Conan Doyle, who recreated it in his classic tale, The Lost World, which imagines the basalt cliffs of Salisbury Crags being inhabited by the creatures.

There is firm evidence of dinosaur activity further north in Scotland, including on the Isle of Skye, where the tailbone of a small, ostrich-like dinosaur was unearthed, along with the fascinating discovery of fossilised footprints of two other dinosaurs, some as long as 30cm.

Though not a dinosaur, experts famously uncovered Lizzie the Lizard – now on display in Edinburgh at the National Museum of Scotland – in a Bathgate quarry.

Lizzie is a 330 million-year-old reptile fossil which is thought to be the world's oldest.

However, as Dr Michael Taylor, the principal curator of vertebrate paleontology at National Museums Scotland, explains: "We don't have any actual evidence of dinosaurs in what is now Edinburgh and Lothians.

"That is simply because we don't have any useful rocks in the Lothians surviving from the dinosaurs' time and that means no fossil evidence.

"No doubt there were the usual dinosaurs wandering around, as recorded in rocks further south, especially in England.

"But a further complication is that for some of that time the area of Lothian would have been under water as far as one can tell, as with the global sea level rise during the early part of the Jurassic.

"Dinosaurs could swim, but not that well.

"So on and off during the Mesozoic, Lothian would have been owned by the marine reptiles, such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and sea-crocodiles: a dinosaur-free zone except for the occasional dead dinosaur floating down river from land."

Experts may be undecided on the extent of dinosaur activity across the Lothians millions of years ago, but they are 100 per cent sure, thanks to fossil evidence, that woolly mammoths were once a firm fixture.

In his latest book, Edinburgh: A History of the City, historian Michael Fry describes the discovery of mammoth tusks and teeth in the Forth, having been dredged up from the bottom of the bed.

"The mammoths must have found the area around Edinburgh quite desirable as there is a lot of evidence that they were here," he explains from his home in the Capital.

"At one point, the landscape must have been much like Sutherland, very heathery and wet, allowing the mammoths to roam around and eat. There is every possibility they could have been in the Grassmarket.

"All of this information is out there waiting to be discovered. I, for one, was pleasantly surprised by it."

Woolly mammoths certainly would not go unnoticed in the Lothians nowadays, with their five-metre tusks bound to attract attention from passers-by.

Although they live relatively carefree lives in the Ice Age films, their existence was far from easy in Scotland, with the last of more than 30 ice ages proving too much for them to withstand, leading to their extinction.

Designed to cope with freezing conditions, their appearance may also have been more intimidating in real life than the on-screen, huggable Manny and his wife Ellie, with a metre-long layer of shaggy hair, with a fine underwool, all part of a make-up to help them survive in Scotland.

BRINGING THE PAST TO LIFE
FANS of all things prehistoric can enjoy various exhibitions and rare finds across Edinburgh and the Lothians, bringing the past to life.

At the National Museum of Scotland, part of the tusk of a woolly mammoth is on display, along with the elbow joint of a woolly rhinoceros.

Visitors can also examine part of the skull and an antler from a giant deer (also known as the Irish Elk) and part of the skull of a ringed seal from around 14,000 years ago near the edge of the Scottish ice cap, where Portobello is today.

At Our Dynamic Earth, visitors can come face to face with an extinct dinosaur and fly over glaciers in prehistoric Scotland, all through interactive exhibitions.

After experiencing the dry tundra that once dominated Scotland's landscape, they can then make their way to the bottom of the ocean, and appreciate what life was like millions of years ago.