A mammoth history: the extraordinary journey of two thighbones

Since the renaissance, specimens have been central tools of knowledge production in zoological endeavours. The biographies of CN86 and CN87 of the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen – specimens formerly known as hip-bones of giants – have travelled through 300 years of human history, a journey that reveals how the accumulation of objects and changes in scientific methodology can give rise to radical reinterpretation. Although the material form of these specimens has hardly changed, the ideas associated with them have undergone extraordinary transition.