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"It seems Roger Fiddler of northern California hasn't cleaned out his garage for a year - of stuff whose carbon footprint apparently dates back some 3 million years.\nAccording to Jennifer Guevin of CNET News, Mr. Fiddler is auctioning off a nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon that was found on his ranch in 1997. The initial discovery of the remains started when a ranch hand found a tooth of the animal. Following a visit by a paleontologist, they learned they had an entire skeleton on their hands, missing only its tusks.\nAfter excavating the animal's skeleton, it spent 3 years at Oakland Museum of California, followed by a stint in a tasting room at a wine bar. (That part's lost on us also.) For the past few years, however, the extinct creature has spent its \"downtime\" in the Fiddler's garage, with some of the bones also being kept in the sauna, which they told Reuters was because they needed a warm, dry place.  The family has decided it is time to part ways with the bones. And, well, where else do you turn to pass on a 3-million-year old set of bones?  Ebay, of course.\nThe auction currently has not received any bids. It has an opening price of $115,000.  As Mark Goodwin of the University of California Museum of Paleontology said, \"What is it going to do? Sit on someone's mantle?\"  Whatever someone does decide to do with it - if it so happens to sell - they won't have to worry about UPS or Fedex shipping costs. The auction clearly states it is \"pickup only.\" Although I would love to watch a typical residential courier try to  delivering this to someone's front door.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/03/16/ebay-dinosaur-auction/>