A 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth skeleton has sold for more than €500,000 at auction in the French city of Lyon. The skeleton is reportedly the largest of its kind to be privately owned.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
Advertisement
Massive mammoth skeleton sells at French auction
A 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth skeleton has sold for more than €500,000 euros at auction in the French city of Lyon. The skeleton is reportedly the largest of its kind to be privately owned.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
Auction in a train station
A massive woolly mammoth skeleton sold for €548,250 ($644,234) in an auction in Lyon, France. The sale, which was put on by the Aguttes auction house, took place inside the Lyon-Brotteaux train station where they installed the massive fossil.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
Recreating a giant
Using levers, pulleys and ladders, a man carefully positions the mammoth's skull. Towering over onlookers, the skeleton is 3.4 meters (11.2 feet) tall and 5.3 meters (17.4 feet) long. Experts estimate that the animal weighed about 1,400 kilograms (3,086 pounds).
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
Arranging the bones
A man checks to make sure every preserved rib is correctly in place. The skeleton was found 10 years ago in Siberia. Its previous owner was a hunter who preserved the animal's remains in his home.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
Nearly intact specimen
Wrapped in protective foam and packaging tape, the mammoth's massive tusks await their final reveal. The skeleton retained 80 percent of its original bones, which the auction house said were in "fine condition."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
Unraveling the tusks
Besides its long, shaggy hair, the woolly mammoth was known for its enormous, curved tusks. Once out of their wrappings, the well-preserved tusks gleamed with patches of caramel and ivory.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
Off to a new owner
Businessman Pierre-Etienne Binschedler won the bidding war for the prehistoric creature. Binschedler, CEO of a French waterproofing company whose mascot is also a mammoth, said the skeleton will feel right at home in his company's lobby in Strasbourg.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Juste
6 images1 | 6
An almost intact skeleton of a woolly mammoth sold at auction on Saturday in the southeastern French city of Lyon for €548,250 ($644,234).
The lucky new owner of the ancient specimen is a French businessman whose company's logo is incidentally — a mammoth.
The skeleton stands 3.4 meters (11.2 feet) tall and is 5.3 meters long
It was painstakingly assembled in a walking position by the Aguttes auction house
The skeleton is composed of 80 percent of the animal's original bones — including its massive tusks
Prior to being sold, the skeleton's previous owner was a hunter who preserved the remains at his home
The skeleton was originally unearthed in Siberia 10 years ago
When they roamed the Earth...
The disappearance of species is troubling us like never before, but the phenomenon is not new. Mass extinctions have haunted our planet quite a few times. And humans entering the scene apparently hasn't helped...
Image: Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian Institution
The Brachiosaurus
Occasional Hollywood appearances aside, this guy retired from Earth 150 million years ago. One of the largest species to ever have walked our planet, this plant-eater must have had a staggering metabolism and large appetite to boot. It took just 10 to 15 years for its young to become full sized dinosaurs - some 13 meters tall and up to double that in length.
Image: Museum für Naturkunde
The Quagga
What looks like a cross between a zebra and a horse is actually: a zebra. A South African sub-species of the common zebra to be more precise. Its indecision about its appearance certainly had nothing to do with its demise. Hunted down by settlers and forced to compete with domesticated animals for food, the Quagga had its final curtain in 1883.
Image: Museum für Naturkunde
Thylacine
Is it a wolf? Is it a dog? Variously called a Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger, it was actually the largest meat-eating marsupial of recent times. A native of Australia, the animal was found on the island of Tasmania. But colonial settlers and the dogs they brought made sure the nocturnal hunter did not survive beyond the 1930s.
Image: AMNH/J. Beckett
The Woolly Mammoth
To survive the ice age, the Woolly Mammoth had a massive shaggy fur to keep it warm. In the exquisitely tempered halls of the Smithsonian Institution, it can obviously do with less. The woolly elephants, similar in size to their modern African counterparts, became extinct 5,000 years ago for eerily familiar reasons: climate change and (early) human hunters.
Image: Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution
Psychopyge Elegans
This ocean-dwelling creature once belonged to a super successful early group of animals that managed to stick around for a whopping 270,000 millenia. But it then disappeared in a mass extinction 250 million years ago. It's a fall from grace not unlike human celebrities: Elegans has begun a second career and has made it big on the internet - on fossil auction websites.
Image: Museum für Naturkunde
Homo floresiensis (aka "The Hobbit")
This serious looking person was discovered in 2003 on an Indonesian island. Barely taller than a meter, he's about the height of Tolkien's Hobbit - hence the nickname. It probably is a species separate from modern humans. Both species shared the planet until very recently - before this hobbit waved his final good bye some 15,000 years ago.
Image: Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program
The Indricotherium
This greatgreat....grandparent of our modern rhinoceros was quite a bit larger than its descendant: Weighing up to 20 tons, this vegetarian needed a lot of greens to keep going and gobbled up the forests of central Asia. When the forests were gone (also for other reasons), so was this mega rhino. Oh, and that was 23 million years ago.
Image: AMNH/D. Finnin
Antrodemus
With this super evil casting photo, this guy should have made it into Spielberg's movie "Jurassic Park." He didn't. Instead, he struck terror in the western United States 150 million years ago. No wonder this large bipedal predator held a comfortable place at the top of the food chain.
Image: Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution
The Passenger Pigeon
Meet Martha, a Passenger Pigeon named after the wife of the first US president George Washington. Martha was the last of her kind and died in Cincinnati zoo in 1914. At home in North America, these pigeons disappeared when humans first cut down their forest habitat and then hunted them for food.
Image: Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian Institution
9 images1 | 9
Proud new owner
The giant skeleton's new owner was identified as businessman Pierre-Etienne Bindschedler, the CEO of Soprema, a French waterproofing company based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.
"We are going to display it in the lobby of our firm," Bindschedler told AFP. "I think we have enough room."
History in private hands: The skeleton sold at Saturday's auction is believed to be the largest mammoth skeleton to be privately owned, according to Aguttes. The auction house also noted that it was one of the few prehistoric specimens to have all the necessary authorizations to be legally exported from Russia.
Selling skeletons: Aguttes noted that auctions for mammoth skeletons are "very rare" and that the first complete mammoth skeleton was purchased at auction in 2006 for €150,000. Last December, Aguttes sold a dinosaur skeleton (an allosaurus named Kan) for a whopping €1,128,000.
Ancient giants: Woolly mammoths roamed North America and Siberia thousands of years ago. They came under threat from a warming climate and increased hunting, eventually dying off about 3,700 years ago. Their remains are frequently found in Siberia and northern regions of Russia, preserved in the frozen earth.