Zoological Museum

The Zoological Museum is a structural division of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the oldest collection of its kind in the country and one of the three largest in the world by number of specimens. It is located on University Embankment on Vasilyevsky Island; the exhibition space covers about 6,000 square metres and includes some 30,000 exhibits. The roots of the collection go back to Peter the Great's Kunstkamera: in 1714 Peter the Great began gathering curiosities, and a few years later acquired the natural-history collections of Albertus Seba and Frederik Ruysch in Europe. By the mid-18th century the zoological section of the Kunstkamera numbered over 7,000 items, though the fire of 1747 caused it considerable damage. The naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, who headed the zoological department from 1767, did much to systematize the holdings.

The museum became an independent institution on 15 July 1832, when its first director, Fyodor Brandt, presented the Academy of Sciences with an exhibition in three halls of a special wing. Over the course of the 19th century the collection grew through the round-the-world voyages of Krusenstern, Lisyansky and Bellingshausen, as well as expeditions to the Caucasus, Novaya Zemlya, the Far East and Central Asia, including the routes of Przhevalsky and Kozlov. By its jubilee in 1882 the museum already occupied 32 halls and possessed the world's best collection of Palearctic fauna. Owing to lack of space, in 1893 the institution was given the building of the southern warehouse of the Bourse on the island's Spit, and after a long reconstruction the new exhibition opened in February 1901 in the presence of Emperor Nicholas II. In 1931 the museum became part of the newly formed Zoological Institute, retaining its former name for its exhibition halls; staff suffered heavy losses during the Siege, though the exhibition itself survived.

The first hall is devoted to pinnipeds and cetaceans — here a 27-metre blue whale skeleton is mounted, and the gallery holds a collection of over 10,000 insects. The second hall is divided into systematic collections of invertebrates and vertebrates — from corals and molluscs to fish, amphibians and birds. The third is given over entirely to mammals: on display are a stuffed thylacine, the skeleton of a Steller's sea cow, and the famous "mammoth" section featuring the Berezovka mammoth, the skeleton of a southern elephant, and the mummified remains of the mammoth calves Dima and Masha, roughly 40,000 years old. Of particular interest are the personal animals of Peter the Great — the horse Lisette, the greyhound of the same name, and the bulldog Tiran.