Dismantled for restoration a year ago, this gigantic skeleton will return to the paleontology gallery on Wednesday June 28. Franceinfo witnessed the final preparations to assemble the remains of this animal that lived around a million years ago.
It is under the glass roof of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, on the first floor of the imposing paleontology gallery inaugurated in 1898, that we rediscover the pachyderm, or rather its skeleton. Still surrounded by scaffolding, the Durfort mammoth is taking shape again before being exposed to visitors again from Wednesday 28 June. The animal had been dismantled a year ago in order to be restored.
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Its nearly 200 bones were reassembled one after the other by the experts of the Aïnu company. “It’s a great turnaround, summarizes Morgan de Saint Rapt, project manager. We started with the pelvis and we attacked after the legs. We slowly go up the whole spine and this afternoon, we put the head, and tomorrow morning, the tusks”.
Tusks three meters long for an animal four meters high and weighing 10 tons. A specimen of southern mammoth, more imposing, but less hairy than its Siberian cousin.
The hypothesis of a fracture then of asphyxiation
About a million years ago, the pachyderm frolicked in what is today the south of France and the commune of Durfort (Gard) where its skeleton was discovered in 1869. “We think he must have gotten bogged down, perhaps fallen and injured himself. The hypothesis of a fracture on one of the limbs is not abandoned, explains Cécile Colin-Fromont, manager of the Gallery. Maybe that’s what caused the death of the animal by a wound, then asphyxiation in a swamp. The new analyzes that we have done, and the analysis of the fauna and flora that were found at the same time as the mammoth, really give an environment of a pond, of swamps around a river that still exists and a rather temperate climate. . We know that the mammoth ate a lot of leafy trees or small branches of leaves there, and therefore oak, beech, a Mediterranean forest environment.”
Correct past mistakes
Ongoing studies should also make it possible to refine the period in which this mammoth lived. In the meantime, here it is again presented to the public, cleaned, consolidated, and even put back in a posture more in keeping with its species, specifies Bruno David, the director of the Museum: “The legs weren’t in the right position because a mammoth or an elephant ambles. That is to say who has both legs on the same side and who advances as a block, then after the two legs on the other side, like a giraffe too. And our mammoth had legs that crossed like the legs of a dog or a cat. So he was not correct”.
The restoration of Dufour’s mammoth cost between 400,000 and 500,000 euros, partly financed by donations from the public.
Olivier Emond’s report at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris
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