Family of four mammoth skeletons expected to fetch up to £400,000 at auction

Mark Dorman
Rupert van der Werff of Summers Place Auctions puts the final touches to the family of four mammoths (Gareth Fuller/PA Images)
Rupert van der Werff of Summers Place Auctions puts the final touches to the family of four mammoths (Gareth Fuller/PA Images)

A family of mammoth skeletons could make up to £400,000 when they go under the hammer.

The four skeletons include a one-year-old mammoth, which is only the second known almost complete baby mammoth skeleton in the world.

The group also includes male and female adult mammoth skeletons as well as a young female, aged around eight or nine.

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They were all found together during building works near Tomsk, Siberia, in 2002.

The mammoth family includes a baby, thought to be only about 12 months old when it died (Gareth Fuller/PA Images)
The mammoth family includes a baby, thought to be only about 12 months old when it died (Gareth Fuller/PA Images)

Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, West Sussex, said the collection will be a unique opportunity for a museum to be the first in the world to show a family scene of the ancient, extinct species.

The bidding, which gets underway later today, is expected to start at about £250,000.

Their relatively small frames indicates they lived in poor conditions and most probably died at the end of the Pleistocene period, around 12,000 to 16,000 years ago, a spokeswoman for Summers Place said.

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Other highlights at the sale include a rare three-dimensional skeleton of marine reptile the plesiosaur, from Lyme Regis, Dorset, which is approximately 205 million years old, which could fetch up to £30,000.

Also on sale is a cave bear skeleton from the same period and that of a rare aurochs, an extinct species of large, wild cattle, which are each expected to sell for £15,000 to £20,000.