by the glaciation, including the woolly mammoths, which suffered a reduction comparable to the one towards the end of the ice age. Sequence and subdivisions The Saale complex may be divided into a lower (also Saale Early Glacial) and an upper section (also Middle and Upper Saale Glacial, or Younger Saale glaciation), with glacial advances into Northern Germany. The Saale Early Glacial includes the: Dömnitz interglacial, which was characterised by oak mixed forest, hazel and hornbeam. Worth mentioning is the discovery of Water Fern (Azolla filiculoides). Fuhne glacial. After the end of the Holstein interglacial, the forests of North Germany died and a sub-arctic vegetation formed. The upper part of the Saale complex (obere Teil des Saale-Komplexes) is characterised in North Germany by three great glacial advances (possibly even four in Schleswig-Holstein). They are usually called the: Warthe Stage or Stadium (Warthe-Stadium) Drenthe Stage or Stadium (Drenthe-Stadium) Drenthe II Phase (Jüngere Drenthe) Drenthe I Phase (Haupt-Drenthe) There are no indisputable traces in northern Germany of clear thermomers (interstadials, intervals) between these advances. In the work by Litt et al. (2007) focussed on the southern perimeter of the North German glaciations, the upper part of the Saale complex is subdivided as follows: Warthe Stage (Warthe-Stadium) Seyda Interval (Seyda-Intervall) Drenthe Stage (Drenthe-Stadium) Leipzig Phase (Leipzig-Phase) Pomßen Interval (Pomßen-Intervall) Zeitz Phase (Zeitz-Phase) (Delitzsch Phase (Delitzsch-Phase)) The Drenthe Stage corresponds to the maximum extent of glaciation during the Saale complex. During the last stage, the Warthe Stage, glaciers only covered northeast Lower Saxony (parts of the Lüneburg Heath), the Altmark, the Elbe valley downstream of Magdeburg and the region east of it (c.f. Südlicher Landrücken), so that these areas are geomorphologically younger than the Northwest German Plain, but older and exhibiting more surface weathering than the much later Young Drift areas of the Weichselian glaciation in northeast Germany. The areas last covered by the Saale cold period, roughly the Westphalian Bight, a large part of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, south Brandenburg, or the Leipzig Bay and Lusatia in Saxony, are called the Old Drift Landscapes (Altmoränenlandschaften). They were further shaped and changed during the later Weichselian cold period by periglacial processes such as wind-borne sand and loess. The major urstromtal associated with the Saale glacial stage is the Breslau-Magdeburg-Bremen Urstromtal, which was not subsequently covered by ice. See also Pleistocene, which covers: References Footnotes Literature Thomas Litt, Karl-Ernst Behre, Klaus-Dieter Meyer, Hans-Jürgen Stephan und