One of the animals that illustrates this best is the Java tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica). In 1826, the museum acquired four skulls and the complete body of a tiger from Batavia, where Ernst Albert Fritze was working as a doctor and regularly sent objects to the museum’s Natural History Collections. To ensure they survived the long voyage, Fritze recommended transporting the bones and the hide in a barrel of rum. After arriving safely in Wiesbaden, the hide was treated to preserve it before being mounted. Today, there are no more tigers on the Indonesian island of Java. After the Dutch began cultivating arable crops and teak, the tiger’s habitat and sources of food diminished. Protected zones were established in the 1920s and 1930s, but by then the area was so densely populated that it was too late to stop the tigers becoming extinct. The exhibition about the future Seven Hills – Images and Signs of the 21st Century, shown in Berlin in 2000, was one of the most expensive the German capital had ever mounted. It included a section called “Cats and Chats” devoted exclusively to tigers in which the Wiesbaden specimen was on display as a symbol of endangered species.

Of all the vertebrates, birds make up the lion’s share of the Wiesbaden collections. There are some very special birds here, like the ones that Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied collected on his expeditions to South and North America and that are still preserved at Museum Wiesbaden to this day.

The pair of imperial woodpeckers (Campephilus imperiales) are likewise real rarities and are impressive even in their preserved state. Unfortunately, they are also one of the planet’s irrevocably lost species. The imperial woodpecker was the largest woodpecker of all and probably one of Mexico’s most majestic birds. It used to inhabit open but contiguous areas of pine forest on the high plateaus of the Sierra Madre Occidental at an altitude of between 2000 and 3000 metres. Their untouched habitat was naturally full of dead wood that provided ample nesting sites and, at specific times of year, a plentiful supply of beetle larvae, which the woodpeckers foraged for in small wandering groups. It was during these larvae-foraging expeditions that their call could be heard, which apparently sounded like a toy trumpet. But this imperial fanfare seems to have fallen permanently silent, for even extensive searches have failed to find any trace of the woodpecker.*

The Java tiger, the imperial woodpecker, and a host of other specimens are just some of the exhibits to be found in the collection of treasures from the natural world, past and present. A few of them even allow us to see into the future, providing an idea of how the animal kingdom might evolve in the long term. Many of these specimens are so sensitive that they cannot be put on permanent display.

Dr. Hannes Lerp
Custos vertebrates

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