* Astronomy

Visitors to Christie's International's Paris auction hall are being greeted by the upright skeleton of a 2.3 meter prehistoric cave bear, poised to strike with his four fangs and full set of eight molars.
The bones of the creature, which lived in what's now Siberia before the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, will be auctioned April 16 along with A 3.8-metre high tusked mammoth, a woolly rhinoceros, and about 80 smaller fossils that include a dinosaur egg, 30 extremely rare bird and fish fossils, Russian trilobites an a meteorite.
Palaeontologists are taking a similarly aggressive stance about the sale, the first of its kind for France and Christie's.

''When you sell a skeleton in an auction, you are taking something away that should be available for science. You encourage looting'' - Jean-Louis Hartenberger, professor at the University of Montpellier.

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 22:32, 2007-04-11