The Rhinoceros of Louis the Fifteenth
Arrived at Versailles in 1770, died 1793
Among the thousand skeletons of the comparative anatomy hall stands the bony frame of an Indian rhinoceros with a remarkable biography. It was sent as a gift to the young King Louis the Fifteenth by the French governor of Chandernagor in Bengal, and after a long sea voyage it arrived at Versailles in 1770. For more than twenty years it lived in the royal menagerie, where it was drawn by artists, studied by naturalists and gawped at by courtiers. It was one of the first rhinoceroses most Europeans had ever seen alive.
The skeleton lets you understand the animal from the inside. Look at the massive skull with its raised nasal bones where the horn, which is made of keratin rather than bone, once sat. The vertebrae carry tall spines that anchored the neck muscles needed to lift that head. The legs are short and thick, with three toes on each foot, and the rib cage is barrel shaped to hold the digestive system of an animal that ate more than fifty kilograms of plants a day. Upstairs in the Grande Galerie you can see the other half of him: the mounted skin, prepared in the 1790s and now displayed in the room of endangered and extinct species.
The rhinoceros died in 1793, in the year of the Revolution, and the story that a sans culotte killed it with a sabre is probably a legend. What is certain is that its body was brought to the new Muséum, where it became one of the first large animals ever to be taxidermied, at a time when the techniques were being invented. The skin and skeleton have survived more than two centuries, which makes it the oldest complete rhinoceros specimen in any museum.
Did You Know? The mounted skin is thought to be the oldest surviving taxidermied rhinoceros in the world, prepared before proper methods of preservation existed.
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