Wet specimen: Right hand of a chimpanzee (originally inventoried as gorilla hand)

The founding of the Zoological Institute at Berlin University in 1884 also marked the creation of a teaching collection. The preparation had been bought from Leipzig drug and pigment dealer Erwin Olbricht as a gorilla’s hand. The missing skin flap was presumably used for microscopic studies. Such specimen were used in lectures and research for anatomical comparative studies, and helped explain the biological ties between apes and humans. Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in 1859, the origin of species had been a hotly disputed topic.