Spain’s Civil Guard said it is looking into a businessman in the eastern Valencia region who had a private taxidermy collection with over 1,000 stuffed animals, including just over 400 protected species and at least one specimen of a long-extinct North African oryx.
According to the Civil Guard, the collection would sell for 29 million euros ($31.5 million) on the illicit market. Its possessor could face charges of trafficking and other environmental offenses.
It was likely that the find was the largest collection of protected stuffed creatures ever in Spain.
They discovered the stuffed animals in two warehouses covering 50,000 square meters on the borders of Bétera. It is a tiny town north of Valencia on the eastern coast.
The CITES convention on wildlife protection safeguarded 405 of the 1,090 stuffed animals.
The scimitar oryx, also known as the Sahara oryx, was extinct in the wild by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2000. At least two other species were on the verge of extinction; the addax, or white antelope, which originated in the Sahara desert, and the Bengal tiger.
Among the stuffed animals discovered were cheetahs, leopards, lions, lynx, polar bears, snow panthers, and white rhinoceros. It had also 198 big ivory tusks from elephants.
The Civil Guard stated that it would look into if any documents exist to support the collection’s ownership.