A Moray museum has unveiled a new exhibition celebrating one of the region’s most famous sons.
The Forres Falconer Museum displays a new sculpture, the Tortiphant, which was shown to the public for the first time yesterday.
Designed by Aberdeenshire artist Dom Buxton, the 6ft papier mache sculpture is of a bespectacled elephant reading a book atop a tortoise.
It was commissioned by the Friends of the Falconer Museum as a celebration of Hugh Falconer’s life and work in India.
Anne Owens, development project officer at the museum explained the relevance of the curious sculpture to the legendary Forres palaeontologist.
She said: “This sculpture comes from a sketch that is in Falconer’s book Palaeontological Memoirs.
“It shows Falconer as an elephant, sitting on the back of an Atlas tortoise reading about his own fossil discoveries.
“It’s originally designed as a clever satire based on what he had found as both fossil pygmy elephants and Atlas or Colossochelys tortoises.”
There are also Hindu connotations to the statue, with the surrounding text of the original drawing explaining the Hindu cosmology of the earth being held up on the back on an elephant, standing on a tortoise.
Mrs Owens added: “We are absolutely excited to have it in the museum.
“We’ve always found that image in the book to be funny and it’s one we’ve always liked, so we thought why not get it commissioned and use it as a centrepiece at the museum.”
Hugh Falconer was born in Forres in 1808 and went on to become one of the most famous palaeontologists in history after being one of the first people ever to discover a fossil ape.
The Falconer Museum in Forres is named after him and was founded in 1871.
The museum is open from 10am-5pm Tuesday to Saturday, and 1pm-5pm on Sunday.