Background
The splendour of Creation
The former Zoological Museum Amsterdam has merged with Naturalis, and now the highlights of the Amsterdam collection can be seen in Leiden.
Bart Braun
Wednesday 23 November 2011

 On 12 August 1883, visitors to Artis, the oldest zoo in the Netherlands, could watch something quite unique - extinction in action, as the very last quagga – a kind of zebra – died that day. It would be another forty years before the Tasmanian tiger offered a similar experience  to visitors to a zoo in Australia.

The quagga was stuffed and sent to the collection of the Zoological Museum Amsterdam, and it was only then that people realised the creature was extinct. Oops. Quaggas bred relatively well in captivity and a breeding programme might have saved them from extinction.

The quagga remained in the museum for more than a hundred years, and visitors to Artis, which started out as a collection of stuffed animals, could come face to face with the past – at least, they could until recently.

The primal Amsterdam half-striped zebra has now found a home in Leiden, somewhere at the back on the fourth floor of Naturalis because, just like animals, biological collections also disappear. The Zoological Museum and several university herbariums have merged with the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity and the pearls of the Amsterdam collection are now on display in Naturalia.

The collection is the result of the world-wide collection mania of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The West had more or less colonised the whole globe and its sailing ships brought home the most wonderful creatures and plants for the collections of the wealthy. In some instances, the animals were stuffed before they came on board, but sometimes they were kept in menageries or circuses before they were stuffed. The stuffed lion in the exhibition belonged to Louis Bonaparte when it was still alive.

Initially, the collections served to represent the splendour of Divine Creation: shells were laid out together in patterns, tropical birds and butterflies were displayed alongside one another in elegant cabinets. Later on, as the theory of evolution took hold, collecting, storing and exhibiting became more systematic.

Naturalia is an exhibition of stuffed animals in a museum full of stuffed animals. Nevertheless, this exhibition presents a view of the past in a way that the rest of Naturalis’ collection does not. The moth-eaten giraffe, with its rents and mysterious black patches that might be coffee but are more likely to be mould, is, in its way, more interesting that the painstakingly stuffed giraffe in the main hall.

Any visitor who takes the time to study the exhibits will be amazed to learn how animals were treated in the eighteenth century, and about scientists, disciplined and dedicated to collecting, who went on expeditions to build up the collections. And about the carelessness of the people in Amsterdam who have squandered their last quagga for the second time.

Naturalia

Exhibition lasts until 19 August 2012

Naturalis, Pesthuislaan 7, Leiden