Siam the Asian Elephant
Died 1997, mounted afterwards
Standing on his own, away from the African caravan, is an Asian elephant with long tusks and a gentle, slightly weary expression. His name was Siam, and unlike almost every other animal in the gallery, thousands of Parisians knew him alive. He was born in Asia around 1946, worked as a logging elephant, and was brought to Europe by a circus. In 1964 he came to the Vincennes zoo in Paris, where he lived for more than thirty years and became the star attraction, famous for his size and his enormous tusks. When he died in 1997 the museum decided to preserve him.
Mounting an elephant is a huge technical challenge, and Siam's taxidermy took specialists many months. Look at the texture of the skin, folded and creased around the knees and the base of the trunk, and at the small ears and domed forehead that distinguish the Asian species from its African cousin in the caravan nearby. The tusks are his own. His skeleton was preserved separately for study, so what you see is the skin and the sculpted form beneath it, shaped to capture his real posture.
Siam bridges the two purposes of the gallery. He is a scientific specimen, a record of an individual animal, and he is also a memory for the city that watched him for a generation. Asian elephants are endangered in the wild, their forests shrinking across India and South East Asia, and the museum uses him to tell that story. Children who never saw him at the zoo still stop in front of him, and older visitors sometimes tell them that they did.
Did You Know? Siam's tusks were so long that keepers at Vincennes had to trim them several times during his life to keep him from injuring himself.
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