There is a woolly mammoth on Belair Road ― but not for much longer.

No, the fantastic beast that roamed the earth before we began keeping time is not going extinct again. But it is migrating in March — to London. There, renowned paleontologist Adrian Lister will look after it at that city’s famous Natural History Museum. That gives Baltimoreans only six more weeks to experience one of the Ice Age’s most iconic animals. Luckily, the weather is cooperating.

The Natural History Society of Maryland received the mammoth bones a year ago from a scientist working in Alaska and has been advertising the exhibit ever since, with a Mammoth mania campaign that is bringing notice to the nearly 100-year-old museum in Baltimore County’s Overlea.

Still, almost no advance reading prepares a person who just turned into a parking lot across from a Dunkin’ to come face-to-face with a tusked, floor-to-ceiling recreation of a woolly mammoth.

“When someone offers you a mammoth, you’re going to say yes,” said Bronwyn Mitchell-Strong, the museum’s education director. “Several people said, ‘That’s too big for you to handle.’ But we said, ‘No, let’s try it.’”

To say it was a mammoth undertaking for this under-the-radar museum in Overlea would be an understatement.

A year ago, the museum didn’t even have regular hours for public visitation and was mostly known to herpetologists, paleontologists, botanists and entomologists interested in looking at its records of how long different species roamed Maryland and where they went.

While intricate butterflies and shed snakeskins share exhibit space with taxidermied bears, moose and birds, most of the interesting collections were in the basement and not open to the public. Many had never even heard of the society, which was established in 1929 in Druid Hill Park before moving to a Bolton Hill row house and then, in 2006, to the current 9,000-square-foot space in Baltimore County.

Not only that, but woolly mammoths don’t come made-to-order, and don’t have Ikea-like instructions. This one came from Alaska in boxes, courtesy of Charles Breeze, a geneticist at the University College London. Breeze, who has a long relationship with the Overlea museum after working at the National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health, fell in love with a native Alaskan while digging in that state and collected one too many boxes of bones. She gave him an ultimatum, Strong said: It’s either the mammoth or me.

Strong and her team MacGyvered the sculpture, using zip ties and rods from the packing boxes.

“It was touch and go for awhile,” said Matthew Falk, who organizes the museum’s clubs.

The display has other whimsical touches, including a tusk that friends of the museum brought back from Alaska decades ago strapped to the roof of their car. There are also mammoth molars, some the size of a soda can, under a cheeky display proclaiming the story is “the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth.”

Woolly mammoths roamed the earth 300,000 years ago, becoming extinct around 4,000 years ago due to changes in climate, pressures from hunting, food scarcity, and habitat loss.

Before the Chesapeake Bay existed, the land that is Maryland today was a marshy tundra, with lots of forestland. A mural at the museum that volunteer Brittany Roger painted tells the story, with the mammoths frolicking in a verdant land along with other now-gone beasts.

Picture a furry elephant with sickle-shaped tusks curving out from the trunk like bent ivory crowbars, and you get the idea. It’s not a surprise “mammoth” has become part of our lexicon as a synonym for big, either. The woolly mammoth, also known as Mammuthus primigenius, could grow to 10 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh 13,000 pounds. A newborn baby was 200 pounds.

The mammoth may be extinct, but its lessons remain. Altering the earth — whether through human migration and improved hunting or emissions of greenhouse gases that fuel climate change — can lead to extinctions. And many extinctions lead to profound changes. And the more things change, the more they stay weird. A company called Colossal is trying to genetically engineer a cold-tolerant elephant that would essentially be woolly mammoth 2.0. The company calls the woolly mammoth “a vital defender of the earth.”

Strong is thrilled that the mammoth has brought so many more visitors to the free museum, which also runs field trips to bird-watch, hunt for fossils, or canoe and kayak. She’s planning a series of fond farewells: an open house on Feb. 3, a movie day on Feb. 8 and a farewell reception on March 8.

The museum is open from 2 to 6 p.m. Wednesdays; from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursdays; and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. the first Sunday of every month. But during the farewell week, it will be open every day.

Last year, Strong and her staff were in the Maryland State House in Annapolis, going from office to office with dinosaur poop trying to secure support for a bill to designate the Overlea facility as the official natural history museum of the state. The bill didn’t pass, so Del. Nick Allen of Baltimore County is trying again. But this time, Strong said, lawmakers from Annapolis are coming to her.

“They’re all going to be here this weekend,” she said last week. “They want to see the mammoth.”