A MAJOR new exhibition at Worcester's museum launches tomorrow.

Ice Age, at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum, celebrates half a million years of Worcestershire's history, from the time our ancestors arrived until the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.

The exhibition starts on Saturday, June 16 with a day of family-themed activities, and runs until September 8, 2018.

However, a number of lucky Worcester News readers had a sneak peak of the exhibition yesterday (Friday) thanks to the Golden Tickets competition in the newspaper.

Commenting on the exhibition, a museum and art gallery spokesman said: "Over this enormous timespan there were many changes in climate, from woolly mammoths roaming icy tundra in Bromsgrove to prehistoric lions hunting the grasslands beneath Bredon Hill.

"The West Midlands was covered by hundreds of metres of ice which stretched all the way to Siberia. Then the collapse of the bridge between Britain and Europe formed the English Channel and made Britain an Island. It was against this backdrop of change that our ancestors first appear in Britain.

"The exhibition includes the oldest man-made artefact in the West Midlands, the bones of the last mammoth found in Northern Europe and the first geological map of Great Britain, produced in 1815 by William Smith and known as the map that changed the world.

"Many of the objects come from Worcester Art Gallery & Museum's own collections as it is the eighth oldest collecting museum in the country."

The spokesman added: "Whilst full of Ice Age facts the exhibition is full of fun too; visitors to Ice Age can come face to face with a Neanderthal, crawl inside our Ice Age shelter and meet Fluffy the Woolly Mammoth.

"The exhibition opens with a day of family activities on Saturday and runs throughout the school holidays, with special events and activities on throughout the exhibition until September 8."

Curator of Ice Age, Deborah Fox, was confident the exhibition would be a success.

She said: "This is such an exciting opportunity to focus on this little explored part of our prehistory.

"The exhibition includes real artefacts of almost unimaginable antiquity from Worcester's own natural history, geology and archaeology collections as well as objects gathered from across the region. It's also going to be lots of fun, from storytime in our Ice Age shelter to a DIY Cave Art Day."

The Ice Age exhibition is part of Lost Landscapes, a joint project between Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service and Museums Worcestershire, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England.

Lost Landscapes tells the story of Worcestershire's Ice Age and the people who made a home in these harsh, dynamic and ever‐changing landscapes over the last 500,000 years until the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago. Lost Landscapes brings this little known period of our prehistory to life through the Ice Age exhibition at the Art Gallery & Museum, the Origins of Us exhibition at The Hive and an art installation Through the Mists of Time, also at The Hive.

Ice Age is free and open Monday to Saturday, 10.30am to 4.30pm. For more, call the Art Gallery and Museum on 01905 25371, visit museumsworcestershire.org.uk or follow @worcestermuseum