Qualla: Knuthenborg Safaripark

Knuthenborg Safaripark: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hubertus45, CC BY-SA 3.0. Fourteen specimens of Archaeopteryx are known to science - the feathered Jurassic creature that sits closest to the join between dinosaurs and birds. One of them is on Lolland, a flat, quiet, beet-growing island in southeastern Denmark, in a museum that opened in 2023 a short walk from a paddock of giraffes. Knuthenborg is that sort of place. It is northern Europe's largest safari park, and it is also a Victorian botanical collection, a family estate held by the same house since the eighteenth century, and now one of the better fossil collections in the Nordic countries - all of it inside a wall built in 1867 out of stones fished up from the sea.

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Image: Hubertus45 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Knuthenborg Safaripark: A Wall of Sea Stones

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Sir48 assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The land was once the medieval manor of Årsmarke, at one point the largest private estate in Denmark, and in 1714 it became the seat of the new county of Knuthenborg. What turned it into a defined place was one man's project. Eggert Christoffer Knuth, born in 1838, had a wall thr...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Sir48 assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Knuthenborg Safaripark: Mr Milner's Trees

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hubertus45, CC BY-SA 3.0. Knuth hired the English landscape architect Edward Milner, whose plans were completed in 1870, and gave him a brief that had nothing to do with animals. Milner laid out a landscape park for a world collection of rare plants. Several hundred species of exotic shrubs and trees went...

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Image: Hubertus45 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Knuthenborg Safaripark: From Seventy Deer to a Safari Park

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian0918, CC BY-SA 2.5. The animals arrived in stages. In 1950 an enclosed zoological garden was laid out beside Svanesøen, the swan lake, stocked with seventy deer. The safari park proper opened in 1969 under Adam W. Knuth, and the collection has grown across the decades to more than forty species with...

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Image: Brian0918 | CC BY-SA 2.5

Knuthenborg Safaripark: Animals With Nowhere Else to Go

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sorenknudsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Some of Knuthenborg's residents are here because other places stopped being possible. When Denmark banned wild animals in circuses, the country's last four circus elephants - Djungla, Jenny, Ramboline and Sarah - were bought out of the industry and given a 14-hectare enclosure he...

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Image: Sorenknudsen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Knuthenborg Safaripark: Big Joe and the Lokiceratops

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hubertus45, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Museum of Evolution opened in 2023 and is not a gift-shop dinosaur display. Its centrepiece is Big Joe, an Allosaurus about 9 metres long and more than 95 percent complete, among the largest and most intact ever found. Alongside it: a Torosaurus named Adam carrying the larges...

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Image: Hubertus45 | CC BY-SA 3.0