AN ICE AGE DISCOVERY
Vika and the Mammoths of Viminacium's Ice Age Past
In 2009 a Serbian coal mine turned up Vika — a near-complete Ice Age mammoth, one of roughly twenty ever found, and Viminacium's most unexpected exhibit by far.
See Viminacium trips on GetYourGuide ↗Found by accident, in a coal mine
In the summer of 2009, workers at the Drmno open-pit lignite mine, immediately next to the Viminacium archaeological park, uncovered a nearly complete mammoth skeleton while stripping earth ahead of coal extraction. It was an accidental find rather than a planned dig — mining at Drmno had already turned up scattered Ice Age bones over the years, but this was the first time a skeleton this complete came to light in one place. Because Viminacium's own archaeologists were already working next door on the Roman city, the mining company was able to call in a trained excavation team almost immediately, which is a large part of why so much of the skeleton survived intact rather than being scattered or damaged by heavy machinery.
Meet Vika
The skeleton was nicknamed Vika, a female believed to be a southern mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii), an earlier and often larger relative of the woolly mammoth that most people picture from the Ice Age. Estimated at up to a million years old, she stood over 4 metres tall and is thought to have weighed around 10 tonnes — noticeably larger than a modern African elephant. Researchers believe she died near the shore of the Pannonian Sea, the shallow inland sea that once covered much of the Pannonian Basin before gradually drying out over the Pleistocene, leaving behind exactly the kind of soft sediment that fossilises large animals well.
Not the only one
Vika wasn't found alone. Heavy rain at the same mine later washed out and exposed the remains of several more mammoths, in addition to the animals already recovered during the original dig — enough that some reports at the time described the site as a small mammoth graveyard rather than a single isolated find. That makes the Drmno pit one of the richest mammoth-bearing sites uncovered anywhere in Europe in recent decades. Most of these additional finds are far less complete than Vika's near-whole skeleton, but bone fragments and partial remains from several individuals are conserved and displayed alongside her in the same park.
Why a coal mine, of all places
It isn't really a coincidence. The Drmno basin's coal seams sit within the same sedimentary layers laid down along the ancient shoreline where Ice Age mammoths lived, grazed and eventually died, so decades of open-pit mining have repeatedly exposed prehistoric bone beds as excavators dug progressively deeper for lignite. The same geology that makes this corner of Serbia valuable for coal — a low-lying river and lake basin that slowly filled in with sediment over hundreds of thousands of years — is exactly what preserved the mammoths for roughly a million years, sealed away until modern machinery finally reached them.
The Mammoth Park
Vika's skeleton is now displayed in situ, close to where it was found and protected by a purpose-built shelter, within a section of the site known as the Mammoth Park — a short walk from the Roman ruins rather than a separate attraction somewhere else on the map. It's a genuinely unusual juxtaposition to walk past a legionary headquarters and a Roman bathhouse, still thinking in terms of centuries, and then minutes later stand over the bones of an animal that predates Rome, and the entire concept of Rome, by roughly a million years.
Don't treat it as an afterthought
Because the Roman ruins dominate Viminacium's name and reputation, it's easy to assume the mammoth is a minor bonus stop tacked onto the end of the tour. In practice, Vika's skeleton is one of only around twenty largely complete mammoth skeletons ever excavated anywhere in the world, which makes it a genuinely significant palaeontological find in its own right, quite separate from anything Roman. It's worth building real, unhurried time into your visit for the Mammoth Park rather than treating it as something to squeeze in on the way back to the car park.