The Durfort Mammoth
About one million years old; discovered 1869
Towering over the fossil mammals at the far end of the hall is a mammoth of a kind most visitors have never heard of. It is not a woolly mammoth of the Ice Age but a southern mammoth, Mammuthus meridionalis, an earlier and larger species that lived in a warmer Europe around a million years ago. This skeleton is nearly four metres tall at the shoulder and about six metres long, with tusks that curve outward for close to three metres. It is one of the largest and most complete mammoth skeletons anywhere in the world.
It was found in 1869 near the village of Durfort in the Gard, in southern France, during work on a road. Two amateur scientists, an engineer and an archaeologist, recognised what the bones were and organised the excavation, and the skeleton was sent to Paris and reassembled for the opening of the gallery in 1898. It has stood here ever since. Between 2023 and 2025 it was taken apart bone by bone, cleaned, consolidated and remounted on a new frame, and the restoration also allowed scientists to study it with modern techniques for the first time.
Look at the skull, high and domed, and at the sockets for the tusks, which are enormous. The molars are the clue to the species: they have fewer, thicker enamel ridges than those of the woolly mammoth, suited to browsing on leaves and shrubs rather than grinding tough grass. The animal was a young adult male, perhaps thirty years old. The southern mammoth is the ancestor of the steppe mammoth and, through it, of the woolly mammoth, so this skeleton is a portrait of the family before the cold set in.
Did You Know? The skeleton is around ninety percent complete, which is astonishing for an animal that died a million years ago on a riverbank.
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