2023-06-28 03:00:21
As of Wednesday, June 28, 2023, the public will once again be able to admire the main guest of the paleontology gallery at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. The fossilized skeleton of the Durfort mammoth, named after the village where it was found, is back where it has been since 1898, after a 13-month absence for a complete restoration and facelift. It remains one of the world’s largest near-complete fossils of a southern mammoth. The world followed this extraordinary project step by step.
The mammoth, in the paleontology and comparative anatomy gallery, before dismantling and restoration. JC DOMENECH/MNHN
Tuesday, May 31, 2022, the museum’s paleontology gallery, Paris 5th arrondissement.
It was 2:30 pm and the Durfort mammoth already had no legs. The tibias and fibulas, humeri and femurs had all disappeared, robbing the skeleton of the majesty of its haughty bearing. He now seemed to be casting a dejected glance at the technicians who, mounted on scaffolding, were busy dismembering him. Soon, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderlandhe would disappear, bit by bit. First, the ribs and vertebrae. Then the shoulder blades and pelvis. And finally, the head, with its powerful jaw and elegant tusks, leaving only the skull. All that was left on the site where one of the largest land mammals ever seen had stood for 124 years was an empty podium surrounded by a fence.
On May 31, 2022, at the National Museum of Natural History, one of those restoration projects that becomes a landmark in the history of science was launched: the highly delicate restoration of the famous and still rather mysterious Durfort mammoth, an emblematic piece from the vast collection of samples and artefacts at the museum in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. This monumental skeleton of a Southern mammothor southern mammoth, measuring 6.80 meters long and 3.80 meters high at the withers, had been exposed on the second floor of the paleontology and comparative anatomy gallery since 1898, the year that the architect Ferdinand Dutert built this magnificent Art Nouveau building on Rue Buffon. Until now, it had never been touched or even cleaned, with the exception of an intervention in the 1970s to remove its feet, which were in danger of being stolen.
Necessity is not always the law. And it sometimes happens that the breeze of chance, blowing against the thick walls of museums, refreshes even the dustiest fossils. The archaic animal benefited from one such stroke of luck. In 2019, the institution’s department in charge of patronage proposed a call for donations to finance the restoration of a piece in the gallery. The Durfort mammoth was quickly chosen.
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