Doe and Hope

Description

The early twentieth century Dutch museum or zoology department Northern Sumatran pig skull specimen presented on a later ebonised raised stand with it’s original description label hand written in Dutch ‘Bataks- Varken’ ( Batak pig).. Instituut voor zootechniek en hoefkunde… schiedel van een tam bataks-varken (gesch.d.does).. Veeartsenijkundige Hoogeschool”.

The condition of the whole is good with a well-aged patination and hue making the skull very tactile. The skull is still in two parts, lower and upper, so that it can be picked up and studied properly and each of the teeth are in place.

The Austrian veterinary school was from 1820 the first educational institution in the Netherlands where veterinarians were trained. Located in the city of Utrecht gradually got an extensive building complex at the height of the Biltstraat at its disposal. After upgrading to veterinary High School in 1918 (dating this piece to that time) it then became in 1925 the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Utrecht University . In 1988 it moved permanently to the Utrecht subwijk Uithof. Batak is a collective term used to identify a number of ethnic groups predominantly found in North Sumatra, Indonesia.

Very seldom with any kind of attribution this particular piece of osteology is pleasing and continues to be a fascinating natural history study to this day.