The 15,000-year-old mammoth skeleton stands almost 4 metres high
Credit: AFP
PARIS: The skeleton of 15,000-year-old Siberian mammoth went under the hammer yesterday for 260,000 euros (US$352,000) at a rare and crowded Paris palaeontology sale.
The skeleton - which with its tusks stands 3.8 metres high and measures over 4.8 metres in length - had been estimated at between 150,000 euros and 180,000 euros by the auction house Christies. The name of the buyer was not made public.
The piece, nicknamed "the President", was "exceptionally large," according to Christie's, which emphasized the rarity of finding such an artefact at public auction.
The Mammuthus primigenius specimen dating back to the Quaternary period, or later Pleistocene, was put up for sale by an unnamed "private European collector."
Also sold Monday was the skeleton of a 10,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) that went for 100,000 euros, well above its estimated price of 65,000 euros.
Christie's auctioned a total of 90 rare objects, also including the skeleton of a cave bear, which sold for 39,000 euros and a collection of 400-million-year-old fossil trilobites - extinct arthropods - owned by a French veterinarian.
Among them was the fossil of an angelfish dating back 50 million years and one of only five known examples of the species in the world. A rare bezoar - a pearl or concretion that forms in the stomach of certain herbivores - also went under the hammer.
While fossils are popular in the United States and Japan, there have been few such auctions in France, where a mammoth skeleton went for 180,000 euros in June last year.
Scientists are generally lukewarm about putting fossils up for auction. "While many fossils are of little interest… major pieces which could help science progress can always turn up in such sales," said Philippe Janvier of France's Natural Science Museum in Paris.
Palaeontologist Martin Pickford, of the College of France in Paris, labelled these types of sales "totally unacceptable" because they "encourage people to damage scientific heritage."
"The bait of gain," he said, "encourages (people) to remove fossils without any concern as to their geological context, thereby further erasing precious information."
Monday also marked the first time Christie's allowed people to bid via the internet. The first internet buyer bought a lot of two trilobites for 500 euros.
Several pieces failed to pass the 500 euro mark, while others greatly exceeded estimates. An agate estimated at 1500 euros sold for 48,000, while a turtle print estimated at 1,500 euros sold for 7,000.
thats fantastic. where did
thats fantastic. where did they find it?
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