Lyon auction sells gigantic mammoth skeleton for €550k

The near-complete skeleton of a male adult mammoth was sold at auction on Saturday 16 December to Strasbourg businessman Pierre-Etienne Bindschedler, whose company has a mammoth as its logo, explains French news source FranceInfo.

Measuring over three metres high and five metres long, the Paleolithic-era skeleton is estimated to be between 12,000 to 15,000 years old.

It had been valued at a minimum of €450,000.

It was eventually sold for €548,250, having been brought to auction by an unnamed English lord, and will now sit in the foyer of Bindschedler’s business headquarters.

The skeleton is extremely well-preserved - with even the gigantic, curved, three-metre-long tusks intact - due to having spent 12,000 years in Siberian permafrost before being found.

“It is an exceptional specimen,” said Eric Mickeler, international natural history expert, quoted in FranceInfo. “The collector has taken great care [with it] and it shows excellent levels of fossilisation at the site at which the mammoth fell when it died.”