Skull of a tamaraw dating back to the 19th century. The museum holds the holotype of this species, which was originally described in 1888 by the French Jesuit missionary Pierre Marie Heude. Father Heude established a natural history museum in Shanghai in 1868—the first institution of its kind in China. Later known as the Musée Heude, it was merged in the 1950s with the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society to form what is now the Shanghai Natural History Museum.
