PARIS — Archaeologists in France have unearthed a rather hairy fossil — a nearly complete skeleton of a mammoth.
The bones — thought to belong to a creature that roamed the earth between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago — were discovered by accident during the excavation of an ancient Roman site 30 miles east of Paris.
It may be only the third remains of a long-haired woolly mammoth discovered in France in the last 150 years. Such discoveries are more common in Siberia.
Archaeologists will try to establish the circumstances of the long-tusked specimen’s death: If it drowned in the River Marne or was hunted by Neanderthal man.
It was a French scientist, Georges Cuvier, who first identified the woolly mammoth in 1796.
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