Rhinoceros of Versailles

Rhinoceros in the Palace of Versailles menagerie 1770–93
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (November 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
  • Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
  • Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 6,173 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
  • Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
  • You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Rhinocéros de Louis XV]]; see its history for attribution.
  • You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Rhinocéros de Louis XV}} to the talk page.
  • For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.
The "rhinoceros of Versailles"

The Rhinoceros of Versailles[1] was a living Indian rhinoceros which was kept in the Palace of Versailles menagerie from 1770 until 1793.

History

The live rhinoceros was a gift from M. Chevalier, French governor of Chandernagor, to Louis XV.[2] It left Calcutta, West Bengal on 22 December 1769, and arrived six months later in the seaport of Lorient, in Brittany on 11 June 1770.[2] From there it was transported to the royal Ménagerie which had been built in response to increasing interest in zoology and Louis XIV's passion for the exotic, in 1664.

Preservation

The rhino was installed in a small pen at the Ménagerie of Versailles. When the rhinoceros died in 1793, having been in captivity in France for more than 20 years, its skeleton and hide were preserved. They are today displayed at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.[2]

References

  1. ^ Rookmaaker, L.C. (1983). Bibliography of the Rhinoceros. CRC Press. p. 19. ISBN 978-90-6191-261-3.
  2. ^ a b c Rookmaaker, L. C.; Jones, Marvin L.; Klös, Heinz-Georg; Richard J. Reynolds III (1998). The Rhinoceros in Captivity: A List of 2439 Rhinoceroses Kept from Roman Times to 1994. Kugler Publications. pp. 95–96. ISBN 978-90-5103-134-8.