Mammoth on sale at Christie's in Paris

LONDON (Reuters) - Museums and palaeontology enthusiasts with deep pockets who have an interest in owning their own Siberian mammoth should head for Christie's auction house in Paris next week.

The auctioneers are offering up the 3.8-metre (12 ft 5.6 in) high tusked mammoth alongside a woolly rhinoceros, a cave bear and a collection of prehistoric fossils for auction on April 16, Christie's said in a statement.

Other items to go under the hammer will include a dinosaur egg, 30 extremely rare and highly sought after bird and fish fossils, Russian trilobites, which are hard-shelled creatures that existed millions of years ago, a meteorite and a strange pearl once thought to cure melancholy.