Mammoth bones loom over Paris sale

For sale: a mammoth skeleton, a 150-kilogram meteorite and a kind of giant pearl formed in the stomachs of certain animals.

Christie's auction house in Paris is hosting an unusual auction of paleontological curiosities, including several prehistoric mammals. The sale takes place Monday.

Bidders interested in buying the star specimen — a 15,000-year-old Siberian mammoth dubbed "The President" — will need at least $199,000. And a lot of floor space: Tusks and all, it's 12.5 feet high and 16 feet long.

Skeletons of a 10,000-year-old, 13.5-foot-long rhinoceros and a 7.5-foot-high cave bear are also going under the hammer...

--USA Today

Egyptians head to France to fetch stolen mummy hairs

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt sent an archaeological team to France on Thursday to retrieve 3,200-year-old strands of hair from the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II, who presided over an era of great military expansion in Egypt, state media said.

The existence of the hair came to light last year when some of the strands were offered for sale on the Internet for between 2,000 and 2,500 euros ($2,668 and $3,336), in addition to tiny pieces of resin and embalmed cloth taken from the mummy.

The seller had said he obtained the relics from his deceased father, who had worked in a French laboratory entrusted with analysing and restoring the body of Ramses in the 1970s. He had offered to provide certificates of authenticity to buyers.

French archaeologists had reacted with horror to news that the hairs were on sale and French authorities arrested the suspected seller in November...

--Reuters

France puts secret UFO archive online

PARIS — France's space agency is opening up its secret X-Files— three decades of research into UFO sightings, including police reports, witness sketches and maps that scientists used to search for logical explanations behind mysterious phenomena in the skies.

The first batch of archives went up on the agency's website Thursday, and the pages have had so much traffic that the site has been tough to access since.

Only about 9% of France's UFO cases have ever been fully explained, the group says, while experts have found likely reasons for another 33% of cases.

The agency, known by its French initials CNES, said it went public with the documents to draw the scientific community's attention to unexplained cases — and because their secrecy generated buzz, with many people suspicious that officials were hiding something...

--USA Today