Ural owls in the correspondence of the State Zoological Museum in Warsaw and the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University - unknown documents illuminating the history of European zoological museums

In the interwar period, the State Zoological Museum in Warsaw (PMZ) was a leading Polish natural history institution with a significant zoological collection and a team of scientists with broad international contacts. As part of their work, researchers from the PMZ often loaned specimens of various animals for their research from many other domestic and foreign institutions. The outbreak of World War II caused enormous losses in the community of Polish zoologists and abruptly interrupted any types of external cooperation. Furthermore, the scientific collections themselves were largely destroyed or robbed. In the case of the PMZ collection, the looting took place in November 1939, when a special unit of the SS Sonderkommando Paulsen transported four trucks filled with zoological specimens from Warsaw to the Haus der Natur museum in Salzburg. After the war, most of the stolen collections were recovered, which, as it turns out, included not only the specimens originally owned by the PMZ, but also objects loaned from other institutions. As the majority of the World's zoological museums do not possess detailed inventories of their specimens, this created complicated, almost unsolvable, property issues that can potentially involve several national and international facilities. One of such cases concerns the loan of Ural owl specimens (Strix uralensis Pallas, 1771) required by Andrzej Dunajewski from the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University before World War II. The present paper investigates hitherto unpublished documentsilluminating this case and provides context for future research on the war losses in European zoological museography.