Mountain Gorilla Diorama at AMNH

In 1921, American Museum of Natural History taxidermist Carl Akeley --- the man who invented habitat dioramas in the late nineteenth century --- traveled to what was then the Belgian Congo to collect mountain gorilla specimens for the museum.

That November, he killed the silverback that now graces the Akeley Hall of African Mammals. While this was a boon to the museum (gorillas in general were little known at the time, and the mountain gorilla in particular had only been scientifically documented 18 years earlier), it threw Akeley into a moral crisis. In his journal, he described "feeling like a murderer" and compared himself unfavorably with the dead gorilla, writing, "Of the two, I was the savage and the aggressor."

He left the Congo determined to convince Belgium's King Leopold II to create a sanctuary for the mountain gorilla. ("I am really fonder of him than I am of myself," he said of the silverback.) In 1925, Leopold, persuaded by Akeley's persistence, created the first national park in Africa, which today is split among the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda.



Without Akeley, there would be no mountain gorillas today. The "murderer" wound up being the best thing that could happen to them.

Four years and 364 days after his conscience awoke, and in virtually the same spot on Mount Mikeno where the silverback fell, Akeley died of a fever. His bones are there still.