The recent discovery of the fossilised remains of the world’s largest dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus has prompted some recollections on long gone beasts that once roved the Swindon area… THEY would have been long dead anyway, having departed to that elephant’s graveyard around 40,000 years ago, give or take a millennia.

But you can’t help feeling a modicum of sorrow for that family of fluffy giants who roamed tusk-first into catastrophe next to what later became the A419 trunk road.

Presumably minding their own business, a group of hulking, grass-munching mammoths, along with their little ’uns, were ambling around the Upper Thames near present-day Swindon when tragedy struck.

Perhaps the shaggy beasts strayed too far out of their depth into the river and were simply washed away and drowned. Maybe they were chased into a watery grave by a large party of our spear-throwing ancestors, or a horde of Neanderthal Men in full-on hunting mode.

What is virtually certain is that at least six of the heavyweight herbivores including some very big girls were butchered pretty much at the same time during what must have been a veritable field day for the axe wielders who cut their prodigious carcasses to pieces.

Their bones and tusks would have provided ample materials for making art, tools and huts. Their curved tusks alone – up to 16ft long – were handy for doorways. Their fur would have become warm clothing. And arguably, their meat would have made one hell of a feast.

Sixteen years ago the remains of our ill-fated herd of female and young mammoths was unearthed alongside the remnants of a cluster of flint axes.

The discovery was triumphantly hailed as the first ever in Britain that linked either early humans or Neanderthals – who were both around at the time – with those now long extinct woolly members of the elephant family.

Bits and pieces such as teeth and assorted bones including a femur – the rear upper leg bone – had lain undiscovered since the dawn of human history… more than 30,000 years before Britain became an island when it broke away from mainland Europe.

Posing for photographs while displaying a prehistoric axe in one hand and a mammoth’s lower jawbone in the other, Swindon-based palaeontologist Dr Neville Hollingworth said upon the discovery in 1998: “This is a very interesting and unusual find.

“What’s really exciting is that the flint hand axes were found with the bones which indicates a mammoth/human interaction. Some of the bones were scratched, suggesting that the axes were used on them.

“There are bones and teeth from about half-a-dozen animals, indicating that we are dealing with a family group.”

The flint axes suggested a mammoth hunt, he said: either that or the animals had all drowned together while trying to cross the Thames before being washed ashore… much to the glee of the area’s two-legged inhabitants.

It won’t surprise anyone who follows such stories that the “significant” discovery was made at the Cotswold Water Park, which is the size of Jersey and straddles the Wiltshire/Gloucester-shire border.

As well as providing all sorts of water related fun and games the 40 square miles of lake-infested countryside has become the Swindon area’s Jurassic Park. OK, the mammoths were not from the Jurassic Age. But plenty of other finds made there have been from that period, along with remnants of life on earth from various other ages.

In recent decades the fossilised remains from creatures who thrived in the Upper Thames as far back as 200 million years ago have been found, from fearsome crocodiles, giant sharks and woolly rhinos to squid-like dwellers of the deep. There has even been evidence of a 70ft long prehistoric whale.

For all of this we can thank our voracious appetite for sand and gravel that has been excavated from the mineral-rich parcel of land for more than 60 years, creating over 150 lakes.

Bone hunters armed with hammers and chisels move in as soon as the diggers crammed with gravel move out. Their search for relics from a long, lost age has to be fairly swift because these vast man-made craters soon fill up… hence the gradual emergence of the nation’s largest inland water complex.

Back in the day, the land we now occupy was the bed of a tropical sea swarming with marine life, including the metio-rhynchus. Or to us, a large, croc-like critter.

A versatile and opportunistic predator, it spent much of its time seeking assorted prey and could leap salmon-like from the sea to grab low-flying lizards.

One of these marine crocodyliform, however, was considerate enough to end its days in such a manner as to become fossilised.

Fast forward around 165 million years to August, 1996 and Dr Hollingworth of the Natural Environment Research Council from North Star, Swindon, was showing fossil hunters around a newly excavated gravel pit near Ashton Keynes.

Suddenly his attention was drawn to something jutting from the mud.

It was matey’s skull.

Dr Hollingworth said: “It is one of the best preserved skulls of the species I’ve ever seen. You can clearly make out its eyes, snout and teeth.”

Only a week earlier he had come across in the same pit a “Jurassic squid” complete with ink sacs.

The slippery fellow had thoughtfully fossilised before deteriorating. Very unusual and significant, it was deemed.

Coincidentally it was a favourite meal of the metio-rhynchus.

“We have now got both the prey and the predator,” said Dr Hollingworth.

Perhaps the croc was chasing the squid when they both came a cropper.

Probably not though as the ex-reptile’s eye socket was embedded with a tooth, suggesting the hunter had been hunted.

“What we have here is a real Jurassic goldmine of fossils,” he said of the water park.

The year before in 1995 Dr Hollingworth unearthed an immense, almost cinematic 50,000 year-old mammoth skull. Six foot long, it was one of the biggest ever found in the UK.

Other intriguing fossils he had coaxed from the muddy bed included a 20ft long, 150 million years old sea monster – an ichthyosaur – which he later reconstructed in his own living room.

That’s right, a prehistoric lounge lizard!

Sharp spot from two smart five-year-old girls

THE owner of an impressive collection of cuddly dinosaurs five year-old Emelia Fawbert went one better when she came across the remains of a giant Ice Age woolly rhinoceros.

She spotted the vertebra protruding from the clay on the bed of a freshly excavated gravel pit in 2008 during one of Cotswold Water Park’s regular fossil hunts.

The atlas vertebra had once supported the massive head of the horned herbivore that roamed the area 50,000 years ago.

The park’s events and education officer Jill Bewley said at the time: “It was a fantastic find. The Ice Age river system probably took the rest of the rhino off towards London somewhere.”

Three years later Emily Baldry, also five, unearthed the rare 162 million year-old fossil of a deep-water ammonite known as rieneckia odysseus at another Cotswold pit.

Almost 16ins in diameter, it was the remains of a mighty mollusc that once lived in a warm sea that covered much of southern England during the Jurassic period (142 to 205 million years ago).

The fossilised sea creature has a spiral-patterned shell with inch-long bristles jutting out to ward off predators – prompting Emily to nickname it ‘Spike’.

Often known as snakestones, because they resemble curled-up serpents, ammonites became extinct 65 million years ago.

THEY were one of the largest and most fearsome sea monsters ever known – and around 100 or so million years ago they were calling the shots above Swindon.

We know this because of two discoveries made more than 100 years apart.

Swindon’s first pliosaur bones were unearthed from our Kimmeridge Clay during the construction of the Great Western Railway Works.

Some more were found – bits of vertebra and limbs – when Lydiard Fields in West Swindon was built in the early 1990s.

Swimming in the shallow seas above our modern day town these vicious bruisers gnashed their prey (fish, squid, smaller reptiles) with razor-sharp serrated teeth after pouncing with the aid of flexible, flipper-like limbs.

Around 30ft long, they were bigger many of the other land-dwelling dinosaurs.