State Darwin Museum

In Moscow is the State Darwin Museum, which was founded in 1907 (note: before communism) starting with the stuffed animal collection of Alexander Kots. Its purpose is to document the range of living things and also present a discussion of how it all developed.

Kots and his wife took a chimpanzee into their house and for many years tried to determine what it liked to eat and do.  Then when they had their first child, his mother ran the same experiments on the child:

They turned the results into a book, "A Chimpanzee Baby and a Human Baby".

Here is the Darwin museum in its current (as of 1995) building:

At the entrance is a statue of Darwin in thought:

One part of the museum shows a scale model of the Beagle and Darwin's room on it:

The museum has had logarithmic or square root growth in attendance over time:

Note the Red Army soldiers being taught about natural history in the upper right photo.

Here is some indication of the range of stuffed animals that can be seen in the Darwin museum.

The last two photos show how dogs evolved over time from wolves to your typical range of domestic dogs.

Some animals agreed to have a photo with me:

Skulls from different cats:

Models of horses:

A worker preparing a new animal model:

The hall on evolution of man ends with the following display (haven't TVs evolved some more?):

In addition to the stuffed animals, there were some temporary exhibits showing live insects. In some of the photos below, my finger gives a sense of scale. Click on a picture to get a bigger image.

The next two photos are "stick insects".  They are the light green things, where the apparent branches move like legs.

Darwin of course had his critics.

In the 20-th century the mechanism for evolution was understood better in light of genetics, leading to the "synthetic theory of evolution":

Would a museum in Russia about biology have a discussion of Lysenko, who was supported by Stalin despite having no real credentials or track record to back his wild agricultural theories, and then proceeded to kill off a generation of Soviet biologists? Yes, there was one wall display. Here is a picture of Lysenko (on the right) and Khrushchev (on the left) with newspaper articles related to the controversies around Lysenkoism:

Here are four of the biologists who met an early demise by continuing to do orthodox work, which did not agree with that of Lysenko:

In order they are Nikolai Vavilov (died in 1943 in prison),  Nikolai Koltsov (died in 1940 of a stroke according to the display, but poisoned according to Wikipedia), Leonid Govorov (shot in 1942), and Georgii Karpechenko (shot in 1942). The Darwin museum is on Vavilov street (number 57), which sounds like it might be named in honor of Vavilov, but apparently the road is actually named for his brother.  Also on this street are several scientific research institutes, including the Dorodnicyn Computing Center (number 40), which is where Tetris was created.

The museum has some temporary exhibits that have nothing to do with the goals of the museum but are promotions for a company. For example, there was a hallway with pictures of mothers and their babies. Would you like some baby soup?

In the basement, near the coat check area, were some gift shops.  There were some sensible gifts, like  models of real animals

but they were also selling the Russian version of Winnie-the-Pooh

as well as a toy gun.