"Changing of the guard" for elephants at National Museum
Recently an unusual changing of the guard took place in Prague - not at Prague Castle but at the National Museum, when a worn-out stuffed elephant was "retired" and replaced by a new model.
"We had had an old specimen of the African Elephant since 1940 and it was really starting to look old. It had been preserved using an old method, in which the skin was mounted on a plaster armature. Also the unstable conditions at the museum, such as changes in temperature and humidity, damaged it."
When three years ago a female elephant died in a zoo in East Bohemia, the zoo offered the body to the National Museum. The museum approached professional taxidermists who had already stuffed a giraffe for them. The complicated procedure took three years and cost around 600,000 crowns (20,000 euros). It was far more than the museum could afford, so sponsors had to help out.
"It was smaller than normal elephants so until recently we thought it was a young animal. But eventually we found it was actually a forest elephant, a subspecies of the African elephant. These forest-dwelling elephants are smaller and darker than their savannah relatives and have characteristically rounded ears. Some experts believe that the forest elephant is in fact a distinct species. In any case we are going to keep it because as a museum exhibit it is quite rare."
The preservation of animals is very expensive and most of the money usually has to come from sponsors. That's why the bodies of rare animals that die in zoos are often disposed of even though they would make valuable museum exhibits. Experts say that Czech museum collections are gradually dwindling. Milos Andera again.
"I believe that museums are there for people to look at life-sized exhibits, be it stuffed animals, fossils or art. I think that no multimedia presentations can replace real objects. Even though it is very costly, we should try and preserve the animals, especially now with many of them on the verge of extinction."
