feiert bald  200. Geburtstag.

Wisent-Dermoplastik Foto: Bettina Henrich

Aktuelle Untersuchungen von Anastasia Fedotova in St.Petersburg haben ergeben, dass diese Wisent-Dermoplastik zu den ältesten dieser Art weltweit gehören: Of Bison and Taxidermy: Biography of a Practical Zoologist Augustus Szusterus

Was wurde herausgefunden?
Der Präparator des Wisents, Augustus Szusterus, arbeitete von 1830 bis 1860 in Vilnius und Kiew.
Im Herbst 1840 wurde dieses männliche Tier für ein Museum geschossen. Üblicherweise waren die Tiere 10 - 15 Jahre alt, also liegt das Geburtsjahr zwischen 1825 und 1829. Das bedeutet, dass 2025 der 200. Geburtstag gefeiert werden kann.
Es dürften weltweit nur sehr wenige Wisent-Dermoplastiken geben, die älter sind als das Mainzer Exemplar und vor allem solche, deren Provenienz klar ist.

Aktuell ist leider keine Besichtung möglich, da das Objekt in einer Klimakammer im Depot des nhm steht. Der Grund ist der Einzug des Gutenberg Museums in Räume des nhm.

Zusammenfassung des Artikels:

The article is devoted to the biography of Augustus Szusterus (circa 1805 — not earlier than 1871), the keeper of the zoological cabinet at the Vilna Medical and Surgical Academy (1835–1841), and then the University of St Vladimir in Kiеv (1842–1870) By using his life as a case-study, we analyse the career of an “invisible technician” in Russian higher education of the 19th century Szusterus was one of the best taxidermists who worked for the academic community in the Russian Empire in the second third of the 19th century He was a student of Ludwig Bojanus, a preeminent comparative anatomist,
and of Felix Brunner, a skilled taxidermist His legacy are museum exhibits that were made as skin-mount over sculpture, the technique that was (as it’s believed) developed only in the late 19th and in the early 20th century; in particular, several European bison mounted by him have been preserved till nowadays The professors with whom Szusterus worked in Vilna and Kiev hardly mentioned his name in their annual reports and other documents, although it is quite obvious that without his assistance, both their educational and scientific activities would have been significantly obstructed We collected information about Szusterus from scratches by using the documents from four countries The most informative documents that we managed to find were about his work on European bison that served as valuable objects of museum exchange and even diplomatic gifts in the 1830s and 1840s It was due to these documents that it became possible to restore Szusterus’ name to the history of zoology.

Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Aurika Ričkienė for copies of documents from the Vilnius archives; to Phaedra Kokkini (Natural History Museum in London), Dr Pepijn Kamminga (Naturalis Biodiversity Center) and Dr Carsten Renker (Naturhistorische Museum Mainz) for providing information about bison specimens and photos; to Alexei Kupriyanov (Universität Bremen) and Maria Pirogovskaya for discussion and valuable comments.