Collection Insight: Radiocarbon dating a Woolly Rhino Tooth
11 November 2025
Radiocarbon dating has helped piece together human history, showing when early people farmed, built homes or migrated. It’s not perfect – items older than about 50,000 years can’t be dated accurately because there’s too little carbon-14 left in them – but it remains one of our most important tools for understanding the past and the timeline of the Earth’s story and the people who lived here long before written records began. Here's what it's helped us learn about a woolly rhino tooth from the natural history collection.
The Box has a large group of cave fossils from the Plymouth area in its collections. Cave exploration here began over 200 years ago, although sadly much of the material that was discovered was lost during the Blitz.
In October 2012, a substantial collection of cave material was donated to The Box by the Kitley Estate, near Yealmpton. The collection comprises over 4,000 specimens including teeth and bones. Recently one of the tooth fragments has been radiocarbon dated.
Radiocarbon dating is a scientific method used to find out how old once-living things are. It works by measuring a special type of carbon called carbon-14. All living things take in carbon while they’re alive, either by eating plants or breathing air. When they die, they stop taking in carbon, and the carbon-14 inside them slowly breaks down.
By measuring how much carbon-14 is left in a sample, scientists can estimate how long it has been since the plant or animal died. It’s a technique that can help archaeologists and historians date ancient objects, fossils and even cave paintings that go back tens of thousands of years.
The tooth fragment comes from a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), a large, Ice Age mammal that once lived in Europe and northern Asia. Covered in thick fur with a large, curved horn, it was well adapted to cold, glacial environments. Standing about two metres tall and measuring up to four metres long, it grazed mainly on grasses and low vegetation. It became extinct around 10,000 years ago, most likely due to a combination of climate warming and overhunting. It’s hard to imagine, but fossils show that species like the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth once roamed around Plymouth.
The tooth fragment has been dated as 47,420-45,988 cal BP. ‘Cal BP’ stands for ‘calibrated years before the present’. It’s a dating method used in archaeology and other sciences. The ‘cal’ prefix indicates that a raw radiocarbon date has been corrected to align with our calendar years, and ‘BP’ refers to years before 1950, which is a fixed point used for the present.
It’s a significant result as it mirrors radiocarbon dates for the same species in other parts of England. Our header image at the top of this page shows the fragment (top left) plus some of the other Kitley Cave specimens in storage.
Thanks to Sarah Marden, natural history curator and Malcolm B. Hart and Christopher W. Smart from the University of Plymouth.