Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10407
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    A hippopotamus skull in the Royal Society’s Repository

    Date
    1681
    Object type
    Library reference
    18847
    Material
    Technique
    Dimensions
    height (print): 315mm
    width (print): 185mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > animal
    Description
    Studies of ‘A Stone voyded by the Urethra of a Man; a ‘Weesle Headed Armadillo’ (‘Tatu Mustelinus’, in Grew’s description); the ‘Head of the Baby-Rousa’ or Horned Hog (Babirusa, a species of pig found in Indonesia); a ‘Tusk of a Wild Boar’; and the ‘Head of the Hippopotamus or the Behemoth’.

    Table 1 from the book Musaeum Regalis Societatis; or, A catalogue and description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society, and preserved at Gresham Colledge, by Nehemiah Grew (London, 1681).

    The Royal Society’s museum collection, or Repository, was established in the 1660s. It was intended to be “a General Collection of all the Effects of Arts, and the Common, or Monstrous Works of Nature”, for use by the Fellows in their attempts to understand and classify the natural world. The first catalogue of the collection was produced by Nehemiah Grew in 1681.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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