Plastinated: Samba the elephant is the latest to receive the 'Dr Death' von Hagens treatment



Germany’s 'Dr Death' Gunter von Hagens has plastinated a pachyderm for a Jumbo-sized exhibition.



The corpse collector, who preserves bodies for eternity with a special gel to display around the world, turned his unique talents to Samba the elephant.

She passed away last year at the age of 41 in Neukirchen Zoo in Germany.

Jumbo-sized: Dr Gunther von Hagens poses with his biggest ever plastinated corpse - a 13ft tall elephant named Samba

Donated to von Hagens' Plastination Institute for preservation, she is by far the biggest challenge to his team so far.



Nearly 13ft tall and weighting 3.2 tons, Samba took 65,000 hours to be turned into the latest star attraction of his circus of the doomed.

'Thirty five people were involved in her preparation and she will be coming back to Germany on display next year,' said von Hagens, who has been criticised by church leaders for his grisly exhibitions which they say defile the dignity of the dead.



In the past he has displayed dead people engaged in sex acts and even a pregnant mother with her unborn baby still in her womb.

Horror zoo: Dr von Hagens has plastinated other animals, including this, entitled 'The Rearing Horse with Rider', which was displayed in Singapore last month

Controversial: Critics say Dr von Hagens' sculptures defile the dignity of the dead, but there is a waiting list of people wanted to be plastinated after their deaths



In his homeland he is something of a folk hero, however, and has a waiting list of people hoping to be plastinated after they pass away.



Samba's first stop when she returns to Germany will be at the zoo where she died of a heart attack.

Dr von Hagens invented the plastination technique in the late 1970s and first presented his grisly show in Tokyo in 1995.



He has since exhibited in North America, Europe and Asia.



The anatomist has courted controversy throughout his career and sparked an outcry when he performed an autopsy in front of a paying audience in London in 2002.



Billed as Britain’s first public dissection of a human body for 170 years, the event saw Dr von Hagens reduce the body of a 72-year-old German man to a heap of organs and a pile of deflated skin.



The British Medical Association’s Head of Ethics denounced the stunt as ‘degrading and disrespectful.’

