BANDUNG (Indonesia) - INDONESIAN scientists are reconstructing the largest, most complete skeleton of a prehistoric giant elephant ever found in the tropics, a finding that may offer new clues into the largely mysterious origins of its modern Asian cousin.

The prehistoric elephant is believed to have been submerged in quicksand shortly after dying on a riverbed in Java around 200,000 years ago. Its bones - almost perfectly preserved - were discovered by chance in March.

The animal stood four metres tall, was five metres long and weighed more than 10 tons. It was considerably larger than the great Asian mammals now on Earth, and closely resembled the woolly mammoth of the same period in terms of size.

Animal fossils are rare in the humid, hot climate of the equator because decomposition occurs extremely quickly.

A team of seven paleontologists from the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java, set the bones in plaster for the trip back to their office after a monthlong excavation and the laborious process of piecing them together then began.

Scientists agree it is the first time an entire prehistoric elephant skeleton has been unearthed since vertebrate fossil findings began to be recorded in Indonesia in 1863.

A piece of the 2.5-metre tusk of the extinct species was discovered five years ago by a geologist on a mapping project in the hilly village of Sungun, Central Java. The bigger find came three months ago when an old sand quarry collapsed during annual monsoon rains.

The next challenge will be removing the delicate bones from their moulds and joining them into a stable, upright structure, a process that experts said is already being hampered by a lack of funding, inadequate tools and poor expertise.

Indonesia, an emerging and impoverished democracy of 235 million people, cannot afford to allocate more than a token sum to its aging museums, even for projects that have the potential to advance knowledge about the origin of key native species.

Gert van den Berg, a researcher at Australia's Wollongong University who helped dig up the skeleton, said tests are under way to determine its precise age and species, but that it will certainly answer lingering questions about the morphology of Asian elephants. -- AP