† Wilkins elephant is a dead Male ♂ Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), , who died 1681-07-17 at Mr Wilkins, in United Kingdom, . Official death reason described as Cage took fire, and elephant was burnt alive..
Wilkins elephant was born wild at Asia unspecified location. and imported 16XX? by English East India Company, by ship from Asia
While on exhibition in Dublin, the booth in which this elephant was stabled caught fire in the early hours of 17 July 1681. The elephant was burned alive. Such a large crowd gathered around the charred remains of the elephant and its booth that armed guards were employed by the deceased pachyderm's proprietor, Mr Wilkins, to protect his property, after the crowd ‘endeavoured to procure some parts of the Elephant, few of them having seen him living by reason of the great rates upon the sight of him’.12 Confronted with a noxious and rotting carcass, Wilkins sent for the butchers, but the Irish physician Allan Moulin proffered his services and was ‘delirious’ to instruct himself in the ‘structure of the elephant’. That night in a temporary wooden shed in Dublin city centre Moulin undertook the first British dissection of an elephant, boiling bones and cutting into parboiled organs by candlelight.
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