ART

A court in the Australian state of Victoria has fined the British auction house Sotheby’s for possession of a rug made from more than 40 skins of the native duck-billed platypus. A Melbourne magistrate on Monday put Sotheby’s on a 12-month $300 good-behavior bond for illegally holding the patchwork rug for a client. Sotheby’s pleaded guilty to charges of importing and possessing what it described as a century-old artifact expected to fetch up to $4,500. The platypus is an egg-laying, amphibious creature that belongs to a very primitive group only distantly related to all other known mammals. It has been protected in Victoria since the early 1920s.