Dead Animal Tales

In the exhibition 'Dead Animal Tales', the museum exhibits its most famous dead animals, showing how and where humans and animals collide and what the dramatic consequences can be for both parties. It all began with a male mallard duck that crashed into the glass façade of the museum, died of its injuries, and was promptly mounted by a (live) duck - also of the male sex. The copulation took 75 minutes, and became known in the scientific community as ‘the first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard’. Each year, on the spot where it all happened in 1995, people gather to celebrate ‘Dead Duck Day’.

Subsequent additions to the Dead Animal Tales include: the Domino sparrow who was shot dead for knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonald's McFlurry cup; the possibly last pubic hair louse on earth; a rat that was inadvertently screwed to some floorboards; the Do-not-swallow-fish: a corydoras catfish that was surgically fished from the throat of a 28-year-old man after the unfortunate aquarium fish was deliberately swallowed alive, and the world’s most destructive stone marten that shut down the CERN particle accelerator in November 2016. The famous kingfisher that was trapped in a frozen pond in 2018 came to be displayed in the museum in the original block of ice. The defrosted kingfisher has now rejoined the museum’s collection of dead animals, in all its former splendor.