On the beach

The nine-year-old fossil hunter says it is "exciting as it might be a major breakthrough in history".

West Runton is also home to the oldest and largest fossilised mammoth ever found in the UK. Dr Waterhouse said humans were still "a rare species... A nine-year-old fossil hunter who discovered a 700,000-year-old bear tooth on a beach said it was "exciting as it might be a major breakthrough in history". More fossils have been unearthed in the past decade as erosion of the coast's soft, glacial cliffs speeds up, so what new information do they reveal about "It would have been a weird mixture of the familiar, the extinct and things we think are exotic now, in a landscape not that different from the Norfolk Broads." However, Etta has another animal in her sights - "a giant beaver - a tooth of a giant beaver, that would be good". "A researcher from Italy looked at the deer fossil collection at Norwich Castle Museum and realised that one of the deer was a new species related to the fallow deer. "We even know more about the temperature and environment in Norfolk 700,000 years ago thanks to pollen and pine cone finds." "I thought it was a fossilised bit of wood so I put it in my pocket, and when we got back to the car park we showed it to a fossil expert and she fell off her chair. "More human footprints have been found at Happisburgh in 2019 and at West Runton in 2017 "To find a perfect massive bear canine is a first for me in 16 years working here," the senior curator of natural history said. Etta found what she thought was "a fossilised bit of wood" at West Runton in Norfolk during the summer.