This is one of the creepiest places we’ve ever visited. It’s the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg and it’s weird.
Really weird.
It is row-upon-row of taxidermied animals lit by harsh florescent light. The depth and detail of the catalog is staggering – take this selection of small birds for example:
There are seven or eight more cases like this “stuffed” with larger and larger birds until you’re looking at eagles and pelicans in the last one.
They do the same thing with fish:
The museum has been in its current location since 1898 and has a zoological collection that consists of over 17 million species, though only 500 thousand can be displayed at one time. Which means that if this is creepy, there are 16,500,000 dead animals boxed and stuffed in a warehouse somewhere.
There are a few exhibits that portray the animals in “natural” environment, like these penguins:
but for the most part it’s row after row of creepy dead things stacked, cataloged and lit like tax records.
The museum turned the bizarre-ness setting to 11 when they decided to use the collection of domestic dogs as the first exhibit you see when you enter.
Weird.
They did have some pretty cool infographic displays like this one involving flies and birds:
Or this one tracing the evolution of elephants and mammoths:
Which went along with the giant skeleton of a mammoth, which was stunning:
Without a sense of scale it’s hard to tell how large this is, so here’s Anjel standing next to a similarly sized mammoth skull.
Several reviews of the museum say that future funding projects hope to “liven up” the exhibit design, and as a reference source the museum really does have a staggeringly complete collection of species – including many rare (and now extinct) animals.
But I think any time you gather up 500 thousand taxidermied animals in one place you’re going to have to fight the creepy-ness factor, no matter how you set it up.
