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The bird collection of the "soldier, scientist and spy" Richard Meinertzhagen, largely held by The Natural History Museum, comprises over 20,000 specimens and was long regarded as of exceptional importance. However, over the past decade it has become clear that much of it was fraudulently acquired and is fraudulently labelled. My talk will reveal how slow and difficult the path may be from well-founded suspicion to a reasonable level of proof, will discuss the techniques by which this was achieved, and will show how detailed research is allowing original data to be restored to some specimens with a high probability of correctness.
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Liverpool, Manchester, Brussels and Bremen are only four great cities that have no zoo. Zoos have become a permanent fixture in Europe's urban landscapes since the establishment of the first institution to call itself a zoological garden in the 1820s. Liverpool and Manchester were among the first to have one after London, Brussels followed,whereas Bremen's zoo was established only four decades ago.
All four have disappeared, and many others as well, never to be replaced. Why? Insufficient financing and a lack governmental or public support are obvious answers, but why do some zoos fail where others have thrived? What happens to their sites, and their animals? In Dusseldorf the answer is relatively simple: the zoo was bombed out during the last War, and the city thereafter had other priorities. A first-division ice-hockey team now plays where once sea-lions had their show; money was there only for a new aquarium. The Hamburg Zoological Garden, on the other hand, had the second largest collection in Germany and well-maintained, monumental animal houses only a year before it was closed down in 1930. The Great Depression and an attractive, privately owned alternative in a suburb were its undoing. The motor-car and motorway permit people in Liverpool and Manchester to reach the Chester Zoo relatively easily, yet both menageries – Liverpool as early as the mid-nineteenth century – succumbed because of other factors than competition from a new zoo. The reasons that zoos have disappeared are as manifold as the menageries themselves – economical and social and a pinch political.
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Objects that under present regulations should be kept at the archives of the Vienna Natural History Museum have disappeared in various strange ways in the course of time. One example of a clearly illegal act proven by documents, are letters addressed to N. J. Jacquin sold by I. Doerfler (b.1866) to other institutes like Uppsala.
St L. Endlicher (1804–1849), on the other hand, sent pictures by Ferdinand Bauer to George Bentham: they never were returned by Kew for unknown reasons. As botanical drawings had been inserted into the herbarium at the end of the 19th century they were also sent on loan together with plant specimens and, in a few instances, had been retained by the borrower.
A fairly recent event of that kind is the loss of pictures of orchids from the Bauer collections that were sent to a specialist at the Harvard Herbaria, but aren't there any longer. Some objects considered as scientifically less relevant have been disposed of by curators such as valuable wax models by Endlicher or old books by various persons. Directors of various departments, and even the predecessor of the present author, donated archive materials to persons of merit outside the Museum. To give a better chances of preserving valuable books during World War II some of them were transferred to the Austrian National Library and sold as duplicates by them very soon after the end of the war without the knowledge of museum authorities. On the other hand, when one of the most important orchid collections worldwide, the herbarium of H.G. Reichenbach fil. (1824–1889), was opened 25 years after his death in fulfillment of Reichenbach's testament (last will), it contained lots of fragments of valuable specimens from other institutions and persons from which they had been borrowed. In the majority of cases the original owner couldn't be found so that they remained in Vienna.
Another way now considered as illegal in which collections were obtained by the Museum was more or less forced acquisition from Jews and other unwanted persons or institutions during the Third Reich.
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The present paper deals with the activities of restoration, re-cataloguing and study which the Centro Interdipartimentale di Servizi "Musei Universitari" Universita di Pavia (Italy) is now conducting since a few years on the collections of the ancient Natural History Museum. The Museum was established in 1771 when the empress Maria Theresia of Austria sent seven cases of "natural productions" to Lazzaro Spallanzani, who was in charge of the Chair of Natural History in the University. The collections grew rapidly thanks to the acquisition of important materials gathered by famous collectors and naturalists, such as for instance the same Spallanzani, the German pastor Goeze and the Dutch doctor Van Hoey, who sold his great collection to the emperor Joseph II, who in turn presented it to the Museum. In the 19th century part of this material was studied by famous zoologists, like F. De Filippi who re-identified the snakes, G. Balsamo Crivelli published the sponges. Furthermore, many important collections from Moluccas, New Guinea and Burma were sent in exchange to the director Pietro Pavesi by Marquis Giacomo Doria of Genoa Museum, while a large collection of non marine molluscs was acquired from the famous malacologist Arturo Issel in 1893. In 1935 the entire Museum of Zoology was transferred from the old University main palace to Palazzo Botta, where it remained until the 1960s, when, for necessity of space, the collections were packed carelessly in large boxes and moved to the attic of the medieval Castello Visconteo of Pavia. The removal of this precious material and years of neglecting in totally unfit conditions marked the beginning of a heavy and progressive deterioration of the whole collection, both dry and in fluid. In order to protect the Museum material from further damages and losses, the Universita degli Studi di Pavia founded in 1989 the Centro Interdipartimentale di Servizi "Musei Universitari", which operates since 1994, reordering and restoring the specimens following conservative criteria, waiting for the building of a new museum.
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In general, the founders of American entomology succeeded in preserving their insect collections. By the 1870s, the donation of personal collections to central repositories like the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Smithsonian, Institution, the Museum of Comparative Zoology provided comprehensive data for the taxonomy of North American insect fauna, and at the same time insured the preservation of individual collections.
The exceptions – those insect collections (or specimens) that were lost, stolen, or allowed to disintegrate through neglect – demonstrate the extent of their success. Neither the loss of individual collections by natural disaster (Christian Zimmermann), nor sporadic pilfering of specimens from colleagues' collections (Entomological Society of America vs. John L. LeConte), nor the ravages of Dermestes and other museum pests (Thomas Say Collection) significantly hindered the amassing and preservation of comprehensive North American insect collections.
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The existence of an unknown manuscript of the French naturalist and painter Polydore Roux (1792-1833) in the Crustacean collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna is published. The museum has got this treasure from the Austrian nobleman and traveller Carl Alexander Anselm Freiherr von Hügel (1796-1870) together with his large collection. Unfortunately the material described in the manuscript has nothing in common with this collection. Hügel undertook an expedition to India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and to the Himalayan Mountains along the frontiers of Tibet and Cashmere. Roux accompanied Hügel during the first part, but died 1833 in Bombay, after the two travellers had parted their ways due disagreements. There are mysteries about his death. It remains unclear how the results of Roux´s work in India were separated from his collection - which obviously got lost - and came in the possession of Hügel. Comparing the itineraries of the two travellers Hügel must got the manuscript in 1836 when he reached Bombay on his way home. Nobody in Vienna took special care about the manuscripts, they were just mentioned in the catalogue of the museums library.
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This paper is a concise account of the scientific activity of the Turkish-born French-American naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783–1840) during his staying in Sicily in the years 1805–1815. An account is also given concerning his collections of natural history specimens gathered in the island, in particular birds, which can be reconstructed thanks to an unpublished check-list (the earliest known for Sicilian birds) contained in the correspondence with William Swainson (now in the Library of the Linnean Society of London). A critical appraisal of Rafinesque's ornithological, list is also given. All the collections of Rafinesque contained in 50 cases were lost off Long Island Sound (Atlantic Ocean) after the wreckage of the ship, which was to carry the scientist and his personal belongings to the United States in 1815.
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An account is given about the discovery of a unique species of bird, Pitta bertae, collected in Sarawak in 1865 by the naturalist and explorer Odoardo Beccari for the Museo civico di Storia Naturale of Genova. The new pitta was described in 1868 by the famous ornithologist Tommaso Salvadori who named it after his own wife Bertha. After its formal description the bird was found to be different from the known species of the genus, and was sent for further studies to French, German and English specialists, in 1873 the case containing this specimen and the types of several new birds described by Salvadori from Borneo and Abyssinia was lost in the mail from Italy to Paris and never recovered again. A coloured picture of the bird taken from the stuffed specimen is still extant. Biographical details about Salvadori's English wife, the beautiful Bertha King, are also added.
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The Indian Natural History Project (1801-1808) was an ambitious and prescient proposal of Lord Arthur Wellesley, Governor General of Bengal at the turn of the 19th century. The project aimed to inventory all the vertebrate life of the Indian subcontinent, an endeavor which we would call today a "biodiversity project". Answering the request of Wellesley, babus and bureaucrats from the entire subcontinent sent "quadrupeds" (both mammals and birds) to Dr. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton who was appointed Director of the Project. Politics prevented the Project from either being completed or recognized. Nevertheless, some 99 odd mammals and birds were "described and drawn" from the specimens sent and they survive today only in manuscript. Both drawings and descriptions contain errors, some quite grotesque, but are of great historical interest.
After the Natural History Project came to an end, however, the animals in the menagerie were not disposed (contrary to many government orders), but remained at Barrackpore , a military cantonment, which served as the Summer Residence of the Governor General of Bengal, and the menagerie collection was kept up (or sometimes not) by the various Governors General and their families for decades afterwards, until 1884-87) when Lord Lytton began handing the last of the animals over to the Alipore Zoological Garden (1873-). The significance of Barrackpore Park Menagerie is immense. A glittering array of colonial personalities visited the menagerie over its half-century of existence and wrote about it in their diaries. Academics in Calcutta continued to use it as a way station for the animals they brought from Arrakand and other wild places but, perhaps more significant, Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of the London Zoo visited Barrackpore in 1810 and saw his first living tapir. As he visited the Jardin de Plantes only in 1817, Raffles' exposure to the erstwhile scientific project, the intrepidly enduring little menagerie, as well as the attractive landscaping of Barrackpore surely contributed to his conceptualisation of the Zoological Society of London.
Barrackpore is only one of many, many native and colonial animal collections in India and the whole of Asia which have been lost over the years, such as the many animal collections within botanic gardens (Singapore, Sarahanpore, etc.), the incredible collections of royalty which are almost too numerous to know, and the more recent and impending legislative closure of more than 50 zoos in India which is, of course, the history of the future.
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Nearly 100 descriptions and drawings of quadrupeds of the Indian subcontinent miraculously survived political prejudice, Company indifference, and a sea voyage only to end up as "stuffing" for the cracks of the India Office Library walls during the cold winters. Mildred Archer rescued these and other natural history drawings and they survive in the Natural History Museum, India Office Library Section today. A selection of these drawings and descriptions will make up a poster presentation with annotations of contemporary information for each quadruped in the presentation.
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