Mastodon on the mantel?

Nancy Fiddler with her mastodon skeleton
photo by Robert Galbraith

So apparently there's a week left to place your ebay bid on the Rustler Ranch mastodon skeleton. It's only $115K, and ebay helpfully notes that you can get "up to $25 back with ebay MasterCard"! So get out $114,975 (plus shipping) and start planning your new fossil decorating scheme.

The skeleton was discovered in 1997 by ranch hand Eric Pedersen on land belonging to Roger and Nancy Fiddler. But the Fiddlers are finding their fossil charge cumbersome:

The mastodon is so big that it's been separated into pieces and covered in white plaster for protection. In storage, it looks less like a mastodon than chunks of the iceberg after the Titanic ran into it. But Fiddler said all you have to do is chip away the plaster and the mastodon should be good for another 3 million years, easy. Paleontologists aren't sure whether it's a boy mastodon or a girl mastodon. Unfortunately, there's a crack in the skeleton right where the evidence would be. The mastodon is sexually indeterminate and should feel at home in Northern California. (source)

After stints in a museum and a wine bar, the sexually indeterminate mastodon is now obstructing the Fiddlers' garage and sauna - and it may stay there, because so far it has no bids. Apparently with the market crashing and people losing their homes, no one has room for a mastodon. Mark Goodwin of the University of California Museum of Paleontology complains, "What is it going to do? Sit on someone's mantle? I would prefer to see it donated to a museum. This is our fossil heritage." (source)

I concur, Dr. Goodwin - a mastodon would look smashing on a mantel! A very BIG mantel! Alternatively, Anthropologie could purchase it for one of its flagship stores' window displays. That would be so wunderkammer chic. And frankly, more people would probably see it there than in the smaller museums. Come on, Anthropologie: we need a little public-private educational partnership here. And the Fiddlers would like their sauna back.

SFGate story