a 40,000-year-old mammoth skull put up for auction in Évreux

A 40,000-year-old mammoth skull will be auctioned on Sunday February 18 in Évreux, France Bleu Normandie learned from the auction house. It is the centerpiece of a sale which includes 191 lots of fossils or stuffed animals, including a dinosaur tooth, butterflies, a parrotfish and a sperm whale eardrum.

This mammoth skull was discovered in the permafrost of Yakutia, Siberia. It belongs to a paleontologist collector from Puy-de-Dôme who wishes to part with it. “He is in good condition, he has the lower part of his jaw, his teeth, his tusks”, specifies Nicolas Fierfort, the auctioneer who is organizing the sale. It measures 1.86 meters high and 63 centimeters wide. Its tusks, measuring 98 centimeters, are broken, not because of the passage of time but because the animal used them to dig “the ground in search of food in the frozen steppe”specifies the Auction House.

The starting price set at 40,000 euros

This is a rare piece, highly sought after by collectors. The starting price is set at 40,000 euros but this mammoth skull could go for between 70,000 and 90,000 euros. The lots are visible this Sunday from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Évreux auction house. The sale starts at 2 p.m. this Sunday.