Help the French Natural History Museum to restore a mammoth!
The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, not far from our hotels, needs help financing the restoration of a mammoth skeleton that is in a very bad state…
We visited the gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy at the National Museum of Natural History for you a few years ago. It’s a completely crazy place, like stepping back in time, and its collection is fossilised skeletons excellent.
However, some specimens have not aged well, and previous techniques to save them have even had the inverse effect.
This is where the Durfort Mammoth comes in. Discovered in 1869 in Durfort-et-Saint-Martin-de-Sossenac near Nîmes, the animal once stood 4 metres high and measures 7 metres from head to tail.
Restoration of the fossilised skeleton is now urgent – large cracks threaten to make pieces fall off and break, and the Muséum says that 9 months of work is necessary to bring it back to its former glory, including a tricky first stage of taking the whole thing apart without it crumbling into dust.
To cover the cost, a crowdfunding campaign has been launched, with rewards depending on how much you donate:
— for 20€ you’ll be thanked on a webpage for a year, receive a newsletter by e-mail and a presentation sheet about the mammoth.
— for 150€ you get two free tickets to see the restored mammoth and an invitation to a conference,
— you can no longer donate 300€, as the reward for this amount was sponsoring one of the mammoth’s bones, and they’ll all been taken!
However, if you really love the project and have money to spare:
— for 5,000€ you’ll receive an annual pass for the Jardin des Plantes, two invitations for the inauguration of the restored mammoth, a visit to see it being worked on, a guided visit of the museum with a paleontologist, and more…
The campaign is already a success – 50,000€ was pledged in just 48 hours and the next target of 75,000€ has nearly been reached!
If they reach the final goal of 100,000€, both the mammoth and its pedestal will be completely restored.
So there you go – time to help out with this great projects!
For more info, check out this page on the Muséum’s website, or go directly to the pledge page here.