Coordinates: 59°56′33″N 30°18′20″E / 59.9426°N 30.3056°E / 59.9426; 30.3056 The Zoological Museum of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences is a Russian museum devoted to zoology. It is located in Saint Petersburg, on Universitetskaya Embankment. It's one of the ten largest nature history museums in the world.
Peter the Great's Kunstkamera collections included zoological specimens. In 1724 the museum became a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A printed catalogue of the contents was published in 1742. It listed the zoology, botany, geology and anthropology specimens and contained an album of etchings of the building and plan of some of its parts. In 1766 Peter Simon Pallas, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was appointed Curator of Zoology. In 1832 the zoological collections were split from the Kunstkamera and in 1896 moved nearby to its present location in the former southern warehouse of the Saint Petersburg bourse (constructed in 1826-1832). In 1931 the Zoological Institute was established within the Academy of Sciences, which included the museum.
In the front hall of the museum, with the monument to Karl Ernst von Baer by the entrance, the exhibition of the zoological collection of the Kunstkamera acquired by Peter the Great in the early 18th century is located, as well as skeletons of cetaceans, including the enormous 27 m long blue whale in the middle of it, and mounted pinnipeds. In the gallery above the front hall the entomological collection is displayed. The second and third halls form a long passage with systematic collections and dioramas dating back to the early 20th century and are situated to the left of the front hall. The second hall hosts the collection of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and invertebrates, mounted or preserved in formalin, and their skeletons or shells. The collection of mammals, including woolly mammoths, is displayed in the third hall.
Famous quotes containing the words museum, institute, russian, academy and/or sciences:
“Things will not mourn you, people will.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 191, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“Whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organising it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Louise, something in me tightens when an American intellectual’s eyes shine, and they start to talk to me about the Russian people. Something in me says, Watch it, a new version of Irish Catholicism is being offered for your faith.”
—Warren Beatty (b. 1937)
“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)