Exhibition about an ancient American

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Its discoverer was Charles Willson Peale, a natural history collector and landscape painter who ran his own museum in Philadelphia. Mastodon bones were first found on American soil along the Ohio River in 1739. A few years later, Peale also saw them, a bustling military doctor having brought specimens to the artist’s studio. In 1801, Peale, along with his son Rembrandt, became an explorer himself, directing an excavation in the Hudson River Valley. There they discovered the bones of the primeval elephant, which adorns the Darmstadt collection today. Because the skeleton was incomplete, Peale and his son quickly added wooden replicas to everything that was missing. The mammoth became a sensation and made its owner a wealthy man. Crowds flocked to Peale’s museum to admire it.

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