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Christie's auction house in Paris is hosting an unusual auction of paleontological curiosities, including several prehistoric mammals. The sale takes place Monday.

Bidders interested in buying the star specimen - a 15,000-year-old Siberian mammoth dubbed "The President" - will need at least 150,000 euros ($A244,000).

Also a lot of floor space: Tusks and all, it's 3.8 metres high and 4.8 metres long.

Skeletons of a 10,000-year-old, 4.1-metre-long rhinoceros and a 2.3-metre-high cave bear are also going under the hammer.

These skeletons are currently owned by a private collector, but buyers could include museums or artists, said Christie's spokeswoman Capucine Milliot.

The auction is not to all paleontologists' liking. Pascal Tassy, professor at Paris' Natural History Museum, decries the selling-off of specimens that could be useful to science.

"It is a pernicious consequence of the Jurassic Park effect," he said.

"We are in a liberal system, in which everything can be sold.

"In the past, private collectors donated to museums, it was a great time of patronage," he said.

"Nowadays we make money off anything."

A 150-kilogram meteorite containing semiprecious stones and showing rare traces of its entry into the atmosphere is valued at between 90,000 and 120,000 euros ($A146,000 to $A195,000).

An unhatched dinosaur egg and a wide collection of fossils - some of them 400 million years old - will also be up for auction.

Among the curiosities is a bezoar, a sort of pearl formed in the stomach of some herbivores, made of a stone or hair covered by a layer of calcium phosphate.

Bezoars that reach or exceed the size of an egg become tremendously valuable. This one is valued at 25,000 euros ($A41,000).

In JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, bezoars are used as a cure for poison.

In earlier times, according to some historians, princes of Habsburg used them to treat melancholy. And France's Cardinal de Richelieu wrote in a 1661 letter to a friend: "I also thank you for your good bezoar that came just at the right moment to pull me through a quite distressing illness."

The auction is also embracing modernity.

For the first time at Christie's in Paris, bidders will be able to bid remotely online.

Christie's Live, used for the first time in New York in July 2006, then in London and Amsterdam, allows users to "virtually" attend auctions.