Elephants and relatives
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of around 40 specimens representing elephants and their relatives. These date from 1881 to 2003.
This collection includes two mounted elephant specimens (Sir Roger and Kelvin), and a skeleton, a skull and teeth of Asian elephants. Held within the World Cultures collections, there are also several elephant tails and carved ivory tusks. Some of the tusks were collected by David Livingstone, while another was presented to Glasgow’s Lord Provost in 1969 by President Banda of Malawi.
There are a further two mounts, five skins and one skeleton of hyraxes (mainly the cape hyrax), and one mounted juvenile manatee and a manatee skull. There are also a few dugong bones.
The highlight of the collection is Sir Roger, an Asian elephant who once toured the country with Bostock & Wombwell’s Menagerie before coming to the Scottish Zoo in Glasgow in 1897. He was shot in 1900 after he developed musth, a normal condition in male elephants that causes aggressive behaviour, and attacked zoo staff. The collection includes early photographs of Sir Roger when he was alive.
About elephants and their relatives
This collection covers three orders of mammals that scientists believe are more closely related to each other than they are to other mammals. They are the elephants (Proboscidea), hyraxes (Hyracoidea), and dugongs and manatees (Sirenia). Together they form the superorder Paenungulata (sometimes called the subungulates). Hyraxes resemble large rodents, while dugongs and manatees are aquatic mammals also known as sea cows. - Broader term
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