Ice Age Giant Is Going . . . Going . . .

Mambo can’t dance, but he’s raising some dust.

About 24,000 years ago, he roamed the Siberian tundra, just another great woolly mammoth looking for wild grasses and a good time.

But now he’s unique.

He’s the first of his kind to be offered for sale on the Internet, thanks to an electronic auction house based in Simi Valley.

Mambo has made headlines from Hong Kong to Hamburg. He’s a handsome devil--massive, with lots of ribs. He’s all bone and tusk now, but looking at his photos, you just know he used to have great hair.

And he can be yours--all yours! With the click of a mouse, you can corral this Ice Age elephant. You can impress your sweetie, or, if you’re a particularly needy parent, your kid.

“There are no Furbys this year, Jennifer. Instead, I got you--Mambo!�

Of course, there’s the small matter of payment.

Mambo’s owners--the folks at the Novosibirsk Museum of Natural History--expect at least $100,000. Last week, about a dozen serious players edged the bidding beyond $60,000. The auction ends Tuesday.

“We’re getting tons of calls,� said Rick Allard, who runs AAANDS.com, the Simi Valley company auctioning Mambo to anyone with a browser and a checkbook.

Allard used to coach football at Simi Valley’s Royal High School. His partner, Brian Rolph, was an athlete at both Ventura and Moorpark colleges, and now plays basketball for an Australian team called the South Peninsula Sharks.

When AAANDS.com started last year, neither anticipated placing massive prehistoric creatures up on the auction block.

Coins, maybe. Antiques. Beanie Babies. Comic book collections.

Several months ago, though, they were contacted by a Nevada agent representing the museum in Novosibirsk, Siberia’s capital.

Three years before, the museum had dug up 80% of a great woolly mammoth’s skeleton 45 miles from town. Paleontologists reconstructed the missing bones, and now the big fellow was up for sale, along with numerous other fossils that would help pay the museum’s bills.

“They had to sell things off to keep the place going,� Allard said.

Executives at the fledgling business weighed the deal’s pros and cons. On the one hand, an avalanche of publicity would spread the company’s name, distinguishing it from dozens of other Internet auction houses and their mammoth rival, EBay. Then again, there would be some grousing by academics about the possibility of Mambo--short for Mammoth Jumbo--falling into private hands.

“It’s comforting when these things wind up in public museums,� said Lawrence G. Barnes, a paleontologist with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “You could hardly pick a single animal that doesn’t need to have a lot more research done on it.�

If Mambo is as complete as advertised, he could be quite a catch for the right institution, Barnes said. The cost of finding a Mambo, digging him up, doing him up, and transporting him, could go well above $100,000.

Bidders are not identified on the Web site. But the company said it expected a “wide array of potential buyers, including wealthy benefactors, philanthropists, paleontologists/scientists, universities and perhaps celebrities such as Michael Jackson, who may have eccentric tastes.�

Delivery of Mambo could take as long as four months, given his painstaking deconstruction in Siberia and his reconstruction at a site chosen by the local buyer. As in many other Christmas purchases, some assembly is required--although in this case the museum will send along an assembler as part of the package.

Some mammoth tusks have been cut up and transformed into jewelry but Rolph is confident that won’t happen here.

“We want a more dignified end for Mambo than hanging around someone’s neck,� he said.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at [email protected].