THE EUROPEAN BISON OF THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY IN PARIS AND THE HISTORY OF ZOOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY MUSEOGRAPHY IN THE XVIII AND XIX CENTURY

Abstract

This article presents a history of the European bison specimens preserved at the National Museum of NaturalHistory (MNHN) in Paris. The inventory made in 1945 by Jacques Millot, who first noticed the importance of these collections for the conservation of the species, constitutes a starting point of the present analysis. The oldest European bison of the MNHN collection came from the royal menagerie of Versailles. Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was the first who has published a description of the species, four years before publication of Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus. Then Georges Cuvier, when working on the MNHN collections, distinguished the European bison from aurochs and compared it to the American bison. His research has contributed to the development of the notion of “extinct species”. This article presents also the history of the European bison from the Zoo of Cologne and the specimens from Petersburg, by Friedrich von Brandt, with a focus on the difficulties of obtaining specimens of the European bison in XIX century. European bison specimens from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris have played a particularly important role in the history of the species biology. They also offer an interesting perspective for genetic studies on the species.