Danube drought lays bare mammoth bone, a Roman bridge and German wrecks

Low water on the Danube has given archaeologists and volunteers a week of finds that usually sit under the shipping channel. Near Ruse in northern Bulgaria, a museum-led search of a dried bank produced fossilised oysters dated to about 60 to 65 million years, a horse jaw in a subfossil state, and mammal bone that curators said was probably aurochs or European bison. A mammoth jaw and tusk fragments had already come out of the same stretch last month.

Further west, near Gigen, the falling river has exposed the foundations of a bridge that archaeologists assign to Constantine I in the year 328. In Austria this month two German Second World War wrecks broke the surface. At Prahovo on the Serbian reach, hulls from the flotilla scuttled in September 1944 to block the Soviets now sit on sand. Some still hold live ammunition. Volunteers at Ruse were told not to touch metal.

A river that has done this before, but not like this

The Prahovo wrecks appeared in 2003, 2011, 2022 and 2024. People who work the river say this summer is lower. In Novi Sad the gauge that stood near 5.9 feet in mid-June was negative by late July. Heat and drought across Europe have cut cargo drafts and left some nuclear plants short of cooling water. The fossils and the wrecks are the visible part of the same shortage.

Krasimir Kirov of the Ruse museum said the field day was meant to teach people how to see a bone and how not to pick up a shell. That is the practical sentence. The historical one is that a third-century bridge and a 1944 warship can share a sandbar when the second-longest river in Europe runs out of depth.