The American Heiner is back.
The full-size mammoth skeleton is currently being set up in the large exhibition hall of the State Museum in Darmstadt, under the gaze of museum director Martin Faass and numerous journalists who watched the act on Wednesday.
For more than 100 years, the mammoth looked down on visitors from the gallery of the State Museum, and it has been in Darmstadt for more than 150 years.
In 2020 it traveled to America, dismantled into individual parts.
And then it couldn't come back home because of Corona.
The American Heiner, as the skeleton is called, recently returned to Darmstadt.
A bit battered from the flight in small parts, but can be repaired quickly.
Because what was broken wasn't the well-preserved original bones, but pieces of plaster that replicate the rest of the mighty beast.
Bones were discovered in 1739
On Wednesday, the mammoth parts were initially still hanging on two pulleys.
In front the skull, weighing around 60 kilograms, with the two huge tusks, behind it the rest of the body.
Experts from the museum, led by Mario Drobek, put the animal back together piece by piece.
Here a foot bone had to be straightened, there a vertebra.
Then the rear support frame was slowly removed and the tail attached, while in front the head was pulled up into position millimeter by millimeter with the pulley.
The American Heiner, also called "Peale's Mastodon" after its discoverer Charles Willson Peale, is described by experts as a sensation in the history of paleontology and is therefore world-famous.
Curator Oliver Sandrock raves about the skeleton's close connection to the history of the United States.
Because the discovery of the bones in 1739 on the Ohio River triggered a scientific discussion in the Old and New Worlds in the course of the 18th century.
The discoverer of the mastodon was not only a well-known artist, but also an enthusiastic collector of natural objects, which he presented in his own museum.
He assembled the bones from several mammoth finds into a skeleton, proving that the world once looked different than imagined.
Still, devout Americans who believed in the doctrine of divine creation assumed the bones of a giant rather than an extinct animal.
According to Sandrock, the realization that the bones were actually the bones of an earlier animal species was a scientific turning point and ultimately led to Darwin's theory of evolution.
Until now, the Americans have only assumed small animals in their country.
The mammoth proved the opposite.
Even then-President Thomas Jefferson supported Peale's museum financially.
According to Sandrock, Jefferson himself was also an avid fossil collector and had hoarded more than 300 mammoth bones in the White House.
Paris-London-Darmstadt
After Peale's death, interest in the mammoth quickly waned.
The bones later came to Paris, then to London and in 1854 to Darmstadt, where the mammoth was given a permanent place in the museum built by Alfred Messel in 1906.
Now the mammoth skeleton is temporarily in the large exhibition hall.
From March 25th to June 19th there will be a special show specially designed for families with objects from art and natural history, with paintings, drawings and fossils.
These include items on loan from Charles Willson Peale, which are being shown in Europe for the first time.
The exhibition is prepared in such a way that it also offers children a lot of discovery fun.
At the end of June, the mammoth will be dismantled for the last time and then reassembled on the gallery, from where it can once again look magnificently and dignified down at the visitors to the State Museum.