A Romanian billionaire who paid £20,000 to shoot an elephant has spent another £30,000 to have it stuffed, mounted and sent back to his home.

Agriculture magnate Ioan Niculae, believed to be Romania's richest man, gunned down the bull elephant in Hoedspruit, a town in South Africa's Limpopo province in in February last year.

It was then collected by a specialist taxidermist who spent seven months stripping the hide of the animal so that it could be dried and refitted in their facility just outside the city of Pretoria.

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Ioan Niculae paid £20,000 to shoot the bull elephant in South Africa. After paying to have it stuffed and mounted it will be transported to his home in Romania

The elephant weighed about four-and-a-half tons when alive, but after the taxidermy was complete it now weighs around half a ton

The elephant's real tusks were removed and replaced with fiberglass replicas, so the originals could be stored in a glass trophy case

The stuffed elephant weighs half a ton... four tons less than it weighed when it was alive

Deiter Ochsenbein, 51, who runs the Highfield taxidermists company which carried out the project, said: 'Stuffing an elephant is a lengthy process.... Alive, the elephant weighed about four-and-a-half tons, but now with all the original interior scraped out and a new fiberglass interior in its place, it weighs about half a ton.'

The elephant's real tusks were also replaced with fiberglass replicas, so the real ones could be separately mounted in a glass display case.

Ochsenbein added that it took six people to complete the body of the elephant, which was made of 47 different pieces.

Niculae, who made his fortune after founding Romania's leading agricultural and fertilizer conglomerate, paid for 19 animals to be stuffed in total

Niculae, who is currently valued at $1.1 Billion by Forbes made his fortune after founding Romania's leading agricultural and fertilizer conglomerate.