Dating to the pleistocene era (between 12,000 and 2.5 million years ago), this top quality Siberian woolly mammoth femur and tibia bones (Mammuthus primigenius) is in great condition. This item originally formed the core of a collection of Pleistocene (2.6million-12,000 years ago) Ice Age material in the Mammoth Museum (Museu del Mamut) in Barcelona, which closed in 2016. It was located on the Carrer de Montcada in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, in a 12th century Gothic building close to major museums such as the Museu Picasso and the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern.

As well as visitors to the historic city of Barcelona, the museum was also very popular with local school children who were able to touch the prehistoric creatures including the tusks, teeth and mammoth hair. Mammoth remains dating from the last Ice Age had been found near the town of Viladecans just outside Barcelona. Elsewhere in the Iberian peninsula, as far south as Granada, many Mammoth skeletons were discovered, some of which are more than 25,000 years old. This demonstrates that, like the rest of Europe, modern Spain was once a snow and ice-covered wilderness, a climate in which the Mammoth, and other Ice-Age fauna such as sabre-tooth tigers and bison, flourished, inhabiting the region until the end of the last Ice Age (around 10,000 BC). Included in this sale from the museum, but originating from the Yakutia Province of Siberia are all of the iconic large herbivore mammals from the Ice age, including an extremely rare example of a woolly rhinoceros.

Condition: very good

Dimensions: Femur is 130cm high, Tibia is 78cm high. Stands are 32cm wide, 25cm deep