Mammoth skeleton found in France

[November 08, 2012]  (AP) -- 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 (50 kilometers) 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.

[Associated Press]

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