Mammoth sold at an auction · 2007-04-17 13:22
The skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth has sold for 260,000 euros at an auction in Paris.
The 15,000-year-old Siberian mammoth skeleton, dubbed The President, along with other prehistoric curios, was put up for sale by Christie’s.
The skeleton stands some 3.8m (12.5 ft) high and is 4.8m in length.
Some palaeontologists were not happy with the skeletons being auctioned, the BBC reported.
Pascal Tassy, professor at Paris’ Natural History Museum, told the Associated Press news agency it was wrong to sell-off specimens which could be useful to science.
“It is a pernicious consequence of the Jurassic Park effect,” he said. “We are in a liberal system, in which everything can be sold.”
“In the past, private collectors donated to museums, it was a great time of patronage. Nowadays we make money off anything.”
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