Science in the 19th-century zoo

The 19th century saw the advent of the modern zoological garden. The newly founded zoos not only claimed to educate and entertain their audiences, but also to serve science by providing direct access to exotic animals. However, reality did not live up to the promise of such rhetoric. The vast majority of biologists preferred to use dead bodies as the material for their morphological research. Nevertheless, there was still a strong interaction between the zoo and science. In the debate on Darwinism, the apes in the cage played a vital role.