Mammoth price for Ice Age skeleton
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 27 November, 2014, 9:08pm
UPDATED : Friday, 28 November, 2014, 3:55am
Agence France-Presse in London
James Rylands, Auctioneer and Director of Summers Place Auctions, prepares the skeleton of an Ice Age woolly mammoth in London. Photo: AP
The skeleton of an Ice Age woolly mammoth fetched £189,000 (HK$2.3 million) when it was sold in Britain with other rare or extinct species.
The 5.5-metre skeleton, made up of more than 150 bones, lay in pieces for decades but was reassembled for display at an auction house in Billingshurst, southern England. Complete with curved tusks, it is thought to be from a male of the now extinct species, which may have weighed up to six tonnes when it lived up to 50,000 years ago.
Nicknamed "Monty", the piece was sold by Summers Place Auctions to a British-based private collector. The fur-covered mammoth would have roamed the steppe stretching across northern Eurasia and North America. The species has been extinct for about 10,000 years.
"Early humans … hunted them for food and used its bones and tusks for making art," a Summer Place spokesman said.
