A rare woolly mammoth skeleton has been sold for £189,000 at auction.
The skeleton, named Monty, is one of the most complete of the species and was bought by a private UK buyer at the sale by Summers Place Auctions in West Sussex.
It stands 3.5 metres tall and is 5.5 metres long (11ft tall by 18ft long), suggesting it may have been a male that weighed up to six tonnes. The skeleton, which is 30,000 to 50,000 years old, was estimated to command a price of between £150,000 and £250,000. It had been in a private eastern European collection for years and was only assembled, including tusks, for the first time when it came to the auction house.
Errol Fuller, the curator of the sale, said: “Although mammoth are not as rare as some dinosaur skeletons, the chances to buy an almost complete skeleton don’t come up very often. We had interest from private buyers as well as institutions from around the world and there was bidding going on between buyers in the sale room and on the phones.”
The lot was offered at the auction house’s second Evolution sale, where a giant egg from the extinct elephant bird was also offered. A Chinese museum was the successful bidder paying £69,960 for the egg, which is more than 30cm in length. It had been expected to fetch between £30,000 and £50,000. Elephant birds were akin to giant ostriches and were native to Madagascar. They have been extinct since at least the 17th century.
At the first Evolution sale, in November last year, a diplodocus skeleton named Misty sold for £400,000. It was originally bought anonymously, but the Obel Family Foundation later revealed that it was the purchaser and was donating the skeleton to the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen.
