There are all sorts of cruel ways that animals die in nature. Some are ripped apart and eaten, some starve to death, and some—or at least one unfortunate weasel—get electrocuted by an 18,000 volt transformer at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
The incident took place last April, when the stone marten hopped a fence by the vast particle accelerator—the most powerful machine on the planet—and was killed instantly after coming in contact with the transformer. But he wasn’t the only victim: The fury little critter’s mistaken leap knocked out power to the LHC, which, as The Guardian put it, “recreates in microcosm the primordial fire that prevailed at the birth of the universe.”
To commemorate the weasel’s unusual end, the Rotterdam Natural History Museum is displaying its taxidermied body as part of its Dead Animal Tales exhibition.
“It’s a fine example of what the exhibition is all about,” Kees Moeliker, the director of the museum, told The Guardian. “It shows that animal and human life collide more and more, with dramatic results for both.”
Other animals on display at the museum include a hedgehog that died while stuck inside a McDonald’s McFlurry cup and a sparrow that was shot after ruining a 23,000 domino display.
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In a bizarre twist, Moeliker started the exhibit after watching a duck rape the corpse of another duck who had just crashed into the museum’s glass windows for 75 minutes.
“I was the one and only witness,” he said. “I’m a trained biologist but what I saw was completely new to me.”
