Mammoths to fetch £400,000

A FAMILY of four mammoth skeletons are expected to fetch up to £400,000 at auction.

The ice age giants were discovered together in 2002, during building works near the Siberian city of Tomsk.

A male and a female, a teenage daughter and a one-year-old baby mammoth were unearthed, after construction workers noticed bones close to where they had started work.

Due to their relatively small size, the animals are thought to have experienced unfavourable living conditions and to have died around 12,000 to 16,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene period.