Mexico City, May 20 (AP) Mexico announced Friday that a huge 2,500-year-old Olmec stone sculpture has been returned from the United States.

The almost two-metre-tall "Monster of the Earth" sculpture appears to represent the gaping maw of a monster that is big enough to swallow people, and may represent a symbolic entrance to the underworld.

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Experts say the sculpture is important because of the insights it provides on the cosmological vision of the Olmecs, considered a founding culture of Meso-America.

Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said the sculpture was handed over at the Mexican consulate in Denver, Colorado, on Friday.

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Experts believe the sculpture was taken clandestinely in the 1960s from Chalcatzingo, a lesser-known ruin site south of Mexico City.

"It was like an open wound, not having this artifact," Ebrard said. (AP)

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