Kabinet van Deinse

At the beginning of the First World War, four dead fin whales washed up on the Dutch coast. They had collided with floating mines. Biologist Anton Boudewijn van Deinse (1885 - 1965), a teacher at the Erasmiaans Gymnasium in Rotterdam, had heard of it, went to the coast and collected seven baleens between Katwijk and Scheveningen. After this event, the rest of Van Deinse's life was dedicated to whales and other marine mammals.

In half a century he assembled an impressive natural history collection in the Erasmiaans Gymnasium, the so-called 'Kabinet Van Deinse'. It consisted of skeletal parts of cetaceans and dolphins, the fleshy parts of these animals preserved in spirits and all possible relics of Dutch whaling. As a teacher he also enriched his cabinet with numerous zoological curiosities that he used in his biology lessons.

Van Deinse made his preparations in an inimitable way using iron wire, black lacquered boards, frames and pedestals and labelled everything extensively in his characteristic handwriting or with stencil letters. After his death, the Erasmiaans Gymnasium transferred part of the collection to the Natural History Museum Rotterdam and the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis) in Leiden. In 1987, the Natural History Museum Rotterdam received the remainder. This collection has been permanently exhibited in an atmospheric space since 2000.