Is this not the very melancholy that viviscopic presentations of specimens are meant to neutralise? Surely, even for an unconscious few milliseconds upon entering the main hall of a natural history museum, the contemporary visitor connects the strange and ruthless affect of seeing nature destroyed with the reality of seeing nature this way? Given this comportment, perhaps it is not the explicit colonial sentiment of Wallace's remarks that should be the most startling, but their cutting contemporaneity. It is this melancholic paroxysm that is characteristic of a troubling moment of recognition, that is, when we reach out to pet the specimen to calm an anxious excitation having noticed something deeply disturbing about this celebrated view on, and of, death and capture. How, then, to inherit this scene otherwise? Ecologising the museum means deciphering the necroaesthetic sensorium of natural history to renegotiate the terms of inheritance and inhabitation on this damaged Earth.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Vincent Normand, Tristan Garcia, Filipa Ramos, Lucile Dupraz, and Etienne Chambaud for their generous friendship and careful engagement while thinking through the question of necroaesthetics during the writing of this essay.