Object Status:
Unlocated
Accession Date:
By 1799
Notes:
After Peale's Museum closed, a portion of Peale's bird collection was purchased in 1850 by Moses Kimball (1809–95), who displayed it at his "Boston Museum". An advertisement in the Boston Transcript, printed 1 October 1850, stated that Kimball had acquired "One Half of the celebrated Peale's Philadelphia Museum". The other half of Peale's birds had been sold to the circus promoter P. T. Barnum (1810–91) and would be subsequently destroyed in a fire at his "American Museum" in New York City in July 1865. When the Boston Museum closed, Kimball's Peale remnants passed temporarily to the Boston Society of Natural History, who disposed of them to Charles J. Maynard (1845-1929), a local taxidermist. The specimens were stored in a barn in Massachusetts for several years, then eventually were deposited at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Harvard University. By the time the collection was catalogued by Walter Faxon (1848-1920) at MCZ, in 1914, in virtually every case the original mounts and labels had been disassociated from the specimens, and an untold number were lost.
Walter Faxon, "Relics of Peale's Museum," Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 59, no. 3 (July 1915): 134, speculated that a data-deficient specimen (MCZ 67845) from the Boston Museum collection, was "Probably the model for Wilson's figure." This may be true, but the only evidence is circumstantial, and Peale evidently had this species mounted by 1799. / https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/6339801#page/184/mode/1up
Specimen Type:
Dead/preserved
Current Common Name:
Red-shouldered Hawk
Current Scientific Name
Accipitridae | Buteo lineatus
Repository:
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (MCZ 67845)
