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Alfred the Gorilla (c. 1928 - 9 March 1948) arrived in Bristol Zoo in 1930 and became a popular attraction and animal celebrity.〔() BBC〕 His fame grew to international proportions during World War Two and after his death he remained an important mascot for the city of Bristol. Alfred's distinct personality led to his popularity amongst younger visitors and he quickly became one of the zoo’s main attractions. His profile was further increased during world war two when visiting soldiers took images and stories of Alfred back to their home countries with articles about him appearing in the US and Australian press. After Alfred died in 1948, his taxidermic form was put on display in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery where he continued to act as a mascot for the city. Alfred’s form was stolen from the museum in 1956 and was missing for a weekend before he was discovered and returned, a mystery that remained unsolved until the death of one of the perpetrators in 2010.〔(Alfred the Gorilla mystery solved ) 4 March 2010 The Guardian〕 He remains on display in Bristol today and served as part of the inspiration for the popular Wow! Gorillas trail in 2012. == Gorillas and Bristol == Bristol’s connection with gorillas dates back to the first gorilla bones ever brought to Britain. After being sent to Liberia as a missionary in 1836, the American naturalist Dr. Thomas Savage wrote to Professor Richard Owen in London, declaring, '' 'I have found the existence of an animal of extraordinary character in this locality, and which I have reason to believe is unknown to the naturalist. As yet I have been unable to obtain more than a part of a skeleton.' ''〔Ray Barnett, ‘The Dictator of Bristol’ in Nonesuch, the University of Bristol Magazine, Spring 1999, p38〕 The letter included a sketch of a skull which Savage speculated might be related to a chimpanzee. Savage also wrote to Samuel Stutchbury of the Bristol Institution, a forerunner of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Stutchbury had more remains sought out and in 1847 Captain George Wagstaff obtained three skulls from the Gabon River in West Africa. When these arrived in Bristol, Stutchbury sent them to Owen who published a paper, on the specimens proposing to call the species Troglodytes Savagei after Thomas Savage.〔Transactions of the Zoological Society of London, Volume 3, 1849, p391. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Uh0hAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false〕 By the time the full paper was published in 1849, however, Dr. Jeffries Wyman of Harvard had already published a description of the bones with Savage’s own preferred name of ''Troglodytes gorilla''. The skulls were returned to Stutchbury and can be found in Bristol Museum’s collection today. The first living gorilla reached Europe in the 1880s, although a ‘very unusual chimpanzee’ exhibited by a travelling showman in England in 1860 was later thought to be gorilla. Most of the early gorillas sent to Europe died within a couple of years, often from lung disease. One of the longest lived resided at Breslau Zoo and reached the age of seven. The first living gorilla to reach Bristol Zoo, purchased for £75, arrived in 1900 but died after a short period.〔A. C. Van Bruggen, ‘International Zoo News’, 1 July 2007.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Alfred the Gorilla」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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