The New York Times has an interesting story about “citizen paleontologists” in the Netherlands. The beaches around Rotterdam’s port, the largest harbor in Europe, are loaded in Pleistocene fossils from the dredging of the North Sea floor.

The beach where van den Berg was hunting, called Maasvlakte 2, is a particularly popular destination for fossil seekers, because it was built using sediments dredged from the North Sea floor. From about 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago, the area that is now underwater was a mammoth steppe of grassy hills, flatlands, valleys and streams on a prehistoric landmass called Doggerland.

“You could walk from here to London,” explained Mol, standing beneath a slowly whooshing turbine. “But be careful, because there are hyenas and saber-tooth cats.”

Some 30 or 40 species of impressively large creatures, known as megafauna, lived on the steppe during the colder stretches, including giant horses, giant bison and even deer that could grow to 8 feet tall.