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The Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes belonging to the botanical garden Jardin des Plantes is the first and thus the oldest civil zoological garden in the world which still exists. more...

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The location

The Zoo is directly located at the Seine in the centre of Paris. It takes about one third of the Jardin des Plantes.

From herb garden to menagerie

The botanical Garden

In the beginning the term Jardin des Plantes only meant a botanical garden with an 58 acres large area. This one was created and built by the royal doctors named Jean Herouard and Guy de La Rousse. So it became known as the royal herb garden. Created already in the year 1626 and opened for the public in 1635 it is the oldest part of the national research and educational institute for science, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, which has been founded in 1793.

The foundation of the menagerie

In the course of the French Revolution the menagerie was founded in the year 1794. According to a decision of the national assembly of the year 1793 the exotic animals of private showmen should have been given to the rests of the menagerie in Versailles or being butchered, filled and given to the natural scientists of the Jardin de Plantes. But the latter let the animals live whereas the exact quantity is unknown. In the following course the royal menagerie in Versailles (ménagerie royale) was dissolved and also these animals were brought to the Jardin des Plantes. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) is considered to be the founder of the menagerie. He was geared to the principals of keeping these exotic animals in their natural environment, with regard to their necessaries under scientific supervision and public accessibility for national instruction. The Jardin was gratis for all visitors and tourists right from his beginnings. While the menagerie at first was just provisional it had been growing in the first three decades of the 19th century to the largest exotic animal husbandry in the whole of Europe. The Zoo was under the scientific leadership of the former head of the zoological department at the museum. He was called Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844). From 1805 on the menagerie was under the commandership of Frédéric Cuvier, who got displaced in the year 1836 by Geoffroy's son Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Research

Due to the institutional connection of the menagerie in the national research institute of the Muséum nationale d'histoire naturelle the doctors and zoologists where able to study the animals. Besides the vertebrate studies also explorations about systematics, morphology and anatomy had been accomplished, like for example Georges Cuvier did. Etienne Geoffroy, Frédéric Cuvier (the brother of Georges Cuvier) attended to the domain of behavioral observation. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Frédéric Cuvier published their results in the quartered opus Histoire des Mammifières. It was first published in 1826 and became one of the basic books about the biology of exotic animals. Furthermore F. Cuvier's plans about the breeding of new domestic animal species got worked out and Cuvier was convinced realizing them in a conceivable space of time.

Read more at Wikipedia.org