The singed fur and charred feet are testament to the weasel’s last stand: an encounter with the world’s most powerful machine that was never going to end well.

Now an exhibit at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum, the stone marten met its fate when it hopped over a substation fence at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva and was instantly electrocuted by an 18,000 volt transformer.



The incident in November last year knocked out the power to the vast particle accelerator which recreates in microcosm the primordial fire that prevailed at the birth of the universe. The partly-cooked corpse was duly secured for inclusion in the museum’s Dead Animal Tales exhibition.



“It’s a fine example of what the exhibition is all about,” said Kees Moeliker, director of the museum. “It shows that animal and human life collide more and more, with dramatic results for both.”



The Cern stone marten, secured for inclusion in the Rotterdam Natural History Museum’s Dead Animal Tales exhibition. Photograph: Kees Moeliker

The stone marten is the latest dead animal to go on display at the museum. It joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armoured, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defence did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week.



It was another unfortunate incident that spurred Moeliker to establish the exhibition in the first place. In 1995, a male duck flew into the glass facade of the museum and died on impact, a fate that did not deter another male duck from raping the corpse for 75 minutes. The incident ruffled feathers in the community but earned Moeliker a much-coveted IgNobel prize when he published his observations . “I was the one and only witness,” Moeliker said. “I’m a trained biologist but what I saw was completely new to me.”



The LHC has been brought to its knees by stone martens before. In April last year, one of the animals bounded into a 66,000 volt transformer and shut the collider down for a week. The Rotterdam museum tried to obtain the remains of the beast, known as the “Cern weasel”, but the highly efficient staff at the European particle physics laboratory had already disposed of the corpse. When a second stone marten met a similar fate in November, Moeliker was ready to secure the animal for the exhibition.



Stone martens - or “fouines” - have a habit of gnawing through electrical cables and are known for causing power outages in the region. “We want to show that no matter what we do to the environment, to the natural world, the impact of nature will always be there,” Moeliker said. “We try to put a magnifying glass on some fine examples. This poor creature literally collided with the largest machine in the world, where physicists collide particles every day. It’s poetic, in my opinion, what happened there.”