Mammoth bones X-rayed

Staff at Shropshire's orthopaedic hospital have carried out an X-ray on what is easily their oldest ever patient – to help solve a 13,000-year-old mystery.

Radiography staff at the hospital at Gobowen near Oswestry volunteered their own time to help analyse the front legs of a young adult woolly mammoth, whose remains were found at Condover in 1986 and were from around 11,000 BC.

The bones were brought to the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic and District Hospital in Gobowen, near Oswestry, by staff from Ludlow Museum Resource Centre.

They called on the hospital's expertise to help them solve the mystery of why the animal died at a young age. Daniel Lockett, curator of natural sciences at the resource centre, said: "The mammoth was about 28 years old when it died.

"Almost the whole skeleton was recovered and it can be seen from the bones that the creature had a healed fracture of one shoulder blade.

"Scans of the bones of the lower front leg were needed to help us try to identify if this broken shoulder had led to the creature suffering a limp which could ultimately have led to it not being able to survive to old age."

The scans were taken after the scanner closed for the day. The images will now need further analysis.