After thirteen months of restoration, it is back. The Durfort mammoth fossil, one of the largest specimens in the world and also one of the best preserved, once again sits as a guest star on the first floor of the National Museum of Natural History, in Paris. With him in front and the other fossils behind, including the diplodocus, this cousin of present-day elephants had left the gallery of paleontology and comparative anatomy to get a makeover.
In 2020, the museum launched a crowdfunding campaign to the tune of 400.00 euros to renovate it. “Its restoration, like that of an old apartment, has some surprises in store,” smiles Bruno David, the president of the museum. Over the years, various and varied repairs had served as a cache-misere. And, while some artifices, such as beautifully crafted wooden ribs, have been retained, others, more or less fortunate, have been replaced.
“Workers on a construction site had thrown away the tusk, taking it for an old pipe”
Living at a period between 800,000 and 1.2 million years, this southern mammoth died young, according to specialists, around the age of 25, when the most wanted specimens could live three times longer. It was probably silted up in the marshes which then formed the landscape of the current Gard, which allowed its exceptional state of preservation… and its totally fortuitous discovery.
“It was two friends, in a horse-drawn carriage, who discovered this mammoth in 1869”, explains Bernard de Fréminville, a local historian who devoted a book to the mammoth in 2008 (published by La Porte des mots). Two scholars who may have saved this treasure by chance. Paul Cazalis de Fondouce, engineer from the central schools, and Jules Ollier de Marichard, archaeologist and inspector of Historic Monuments, had gone to Durfort-et-Saint-Martin-de-Sossenac, in the Gard, to explore a cave. To their great surprise, they had then discovered on the way, what they thought at first to be “an elephant’s tusk in the middle of embankments, which the workers of a construction site had taken for an old pipe”. Before continuing their excavations and discovering this incredible skeleton.
Three years in the open air before joining the museum
But, between the torrential rains, the war against Germany in 1870 and the excavation costs, the site stopped almost for three years and the bones left in the open air. Until the purchase by the Natural History Museum in 1872, its journey in 33 cases and finally its assembly and its exhibition in 1898 at the museum.
In this village in the Cévennes foothills, which has kept all its authenticity, the inhabitants almost all have anecdotes, passed down from generation to generation about “their” mammoth. However, if the town hall is well located at 35, route du mammoth, and the snack bar is called, in the blink of an eye, The lair of the mammoth, there is strangely no visible reference on the town hall websiteor that of the Piedmont Cévennes tourist office, of the most famous inhabitant of the commune. An oversight, perhaps soon filled in this village of 750 souls where the mayor, Robert Condomines, wishes “to create a museum or a discovery trail in Durfort which would recall the history of the mammoth and its excavations”. A specimen that once again takes pride of place in one of the most prestigious natural history museums in the world, 760 kilometers away…