By contrast, I found the sight of a haul of smuggled tusks in Bangkok Airport profoundly depressing.
Their tusks could grow to 5m (16ft) but only 1.5m (5ft) sections are on show.
BBC: Tim Batty, curator of the Dinosaur Museum, with the tusks
For a poor villager in Africa, poaching an elephant for its tusks is easy money.
In both cases, the elephants' faces had been hacked off to remove the tusks.
Forest elephants are distinguished from the more familiar savanna elephants by their smaller size and straighter tusks.
CNN: Cameroon elephant slaughter latest in string of killings
Among Asian elephants, only the males have tusks and are far more difficult to handle than females.
Professor Lister said it was hard to tell whether the tusks were fossil or modern without examining them close-up.
The tusks have been kept submerged to preserve them before tests are carried out by the council's museum service.
In Asia, elephant populations are especially vulnerable, as only the males have tusks.
The find includes three bronze cannons, thousands of Spanish and Portuguese gold coins, and several tonnes of elephant tusks.
The materials used for the barrel and caps can be quite exotic and include mammoth tusks, jade and exotic woods.
All 37 tusks that Dr Wasser tested matched the elephant genetics of Zambia and the region slightly outside its borders.
They are culling them in order to match numbers to available habitat, so why not turn a profit on the tusks?
Tim Batty, curator of the Dinosaur Museum, said the tusks were unusually coloured because they had been in water for so long.
BBC: Tim Batty, curator of the Dinosaur Museum, with the tusks
According to reports by Traffic, the shipment was en route to China from Togo and comprised some 1, 500 pieces of tusks.
Present-day fishing trawlers in the North Sea occasionally dredge up the bones and tusks of the mastodons and other game from the ocean floor.
There are rumors of rogue walruses that prey on seals, puncturing them with their tusks, then sucking out the fat with their powerful mouths.
They include human teeth, the skull of a woolly rhinoceros, mammoth tusks and a tooth, flint tools and the antler of a giant deer.
Though some elephants have been killed for their tusks on Sabah in past years, there was no sign that these animals had been poached.
"Palaeontologists were not so happy because these are the intricacies of DNA that are very difficult to discern based on mammoth tusks and teeth, " he added.
Big and dark and looking slightly weary, his white tusks flashing in the sun, the elephant walked towards our table with a steady gait, moving with a dogged, fatigued determination.
He said it was probably more likely they were modern as they were so well-preserved, and could perhaps be part of a cargo of African or Asian elephant tusks.
Spokesman Ajantha Palihawadana said such captures would interfere with nature by removing some of the best genetic stock from the elephant population, including some with tusks which are relatively rare.
The earliest trumpets, used as signaling or ceremonial instruments in many ancient cultures, were very natural: they were made of such things as ram's horns, ox horns, seashells, and elephant tusks.
In August a record three-ton haul of tusks -- estimated to have been taken from approximately 100 elephants -- was confiscated as it was being unloaded from a freighter in Osaka, Japan.
When the North Sea formed at the end of the last ice age, the tusks became buried in the thin layers of sand at the bottom of the shallow southern part of it.
BBC: Tim Batty, curator of the Dinosaur Museum, with the tusks
He cited the massive upsurge in poaching of Africa's endangered elephants and rhinos, whose slaughter the worst in two decades is being driven by rising demand in Asia for their tusks and horns.
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