Now it's gone, the five-meter-long anaconda snake, like a capybara chokes into itself, literally pulling its movable jaw over the prey as a whole, which gradually disappears into the gullet of its attacker.
Something is jerking together, not just as it were.
The monstrous dermoplasty, which is almost a hundred years old, naturally only depicts one phase of the swallowing process.
The vagabond imagination, which is not guided by any rules of conduct, deals all the more vividly with the tormenting process character of this food intake.
Children and adults who used to stand around the showcase in Frankfurt's Senckenberg Natural History Museum involuntarily added what was still missing in the presentation.
The museum reports: "The taxidermist at the time created the extraordinary arrangement of the capybara and the anaconda, which was in the swallowing phase, in coordination with Senckenberg reptile researchers of the time."
Eat, be eaten
Apparently, eat-and-be-eat dermoplasty has robustly survived all the refining developments in empathy and trauma research.
The double-bodied monster stood there in front of us as if from another, berserk-like time: two creatures at eye level, and nothing is impossible if the advance is sufficiently abrupt, contrary to the neo-Aristotelian ideal world ideas that stand behind the book titles on cooperation in the animal kingdom suggest.
The fact is that the anaconda is the undisputed top of the food chain in the animal kingdom and from there it will eat anything that can surprise it as an ambush hunter and overwhelm it with its massive body mass.
For decades, a variant of species justice was presented with the Frankfurt exhibit, which, in a highly individual manner, demonstrates a freedom that wants to be blind to all laws except one's own.
Only now does this idiosyncratic total work of art disappear from the scene.
The museum spread gallows humour: no, the anaconda had not “escaped”, it was only cleaned and could be viewed again at the end of April “together” with its prey.
But then also in a cleaned museum educational course, as is to be expected, “in an environment that has been redesigned in terms of content and graphics,” the museum announces.
One way or another, we will be made to realize that the anaconda is not a model for humans.