“A primeval world, conjured into the present”. Carl Hagenbeck’s Primeval Park at Stellingen

In the early 1900s, zoological gardens throughout Europe began to incorporate images from extinct life to link it to extant nature. The most prominent of those was probably Carl Hagenbeck’s Urzeitpark, a series of statues of extinct creatures that became part of his revolutionary zoo in Stellingen near Hamburg in 1909. Although not the first…