The Dear Bones

☽ The SKULLGARDEN Coloring Book is now funding on Kickstarter until February 29th! ☾

Reblog this post to win* one of TEN books that I’ll be giving away once the campaign is over and books are printed. If you win the reblog contest and also back the project, then I’ll also include some original art!

Please share and consider backing this project if you’re interested in stones, bones, and weird surreal nature and wildlife. If we meet and exceed our goal, then I’ll be included extra free stuff and possibly additional pages to the book!

*this giveaway is not related to or endorsed by Tumblr. You must not edit or remove any text in any way. You may reblog as many times as you like until the end of the campaign.

DO THE THING

The infamous Cheetah that Daniel M. mounted after many taxidermists told him the skin would turn into ‘cheetah soup’ after it was rehydrated because it was a 70 year old pelt.   It managed to hold up hydration and was mounted up.  It was featured in a previous issue of Breakthrough magazines.

Its important that with mountable skins that they must be stored properly in order to make sure the tan holds up as well as getting it tanned properly.  If I recall this skin was in a museum freezer as a dry tan all those years.

Photos taken at http://www.nhm.org/

Oxford University Museum of Natural History skeleton line-up.

I did some repair work at a local oddities shop called Beloved Relics. They’re incredibly fantastic people and I am excited to continue working with them in the future.

Every collection has to start somewhere. Meet Mammal No. 1, the first specimen in the Museum’s Mammalogy collection. 

In early taxidermy mounts, animals were often depicted as snarling and ferocious. This lion (Panthera leo) was acquired not long after the Museum’s founding in 1869. The Mammalogy collection today holds almost 280,000 specimens. 

See many more behind-the-scenes specimens in episode 1 of the new series Shelf Life.

Elephant Skin

Not sure it’s true but someone mentioned that this was a circus elephant that died of old age & was stuffed for display in a museum. - Via

That is a trip.

It’s that time of year again…

Students are leaving campus for the holidays, and the Museum staff doesn’t know what to do with all their new-found free time…

So we decided to make the museum a bit more…festive!

HOLIDAY HATS FOR ALL THE SPECIMENS!!!

Martha Maxwell (1831-1881) was a naturalist who taught herself taxidermy. She had children bring her animals at first but soon wanted more control on the species, so she learned to hunt and collected her own specimens. While living in Pennsylvania, she displayed animals she had collected in the west at the Philadelphia Exhibition. Easterners were amazed by these animals they had never seen before, and couldn’t believe Martha was responsible for them. She placed a plaque next to her exhibit titled “Woman’s Work”.

Martha identified the Colorado screech owl (its scientific name is Scops asio maxwellae) and pioneered the creation of natural history dioramas that included the animals’ native habitat and realistic poses.

The Liverpool pigeon or spotted green pigeon (Caloenas maculata) is known only from one surviving specimen and one lost specimen, collected between 1783 and 1823. The single surviving specimen has been kept at the Liverpool Museum in England since 1851, and is pictured above.

"The providence of the specimens is unknown, but it seems most likely to have been a Pacific species, given the main area of activity of its collectors. Its short, rounded wings suggest it evolved on a small predator-free island. It was possibly the bird described by the people of Tahiti in 1928 as being speckled green and white (Gibbs 2001). It is likely to have been almost extinct before European exploration of the Pacific began." [x]

Spooky albino deer by massdistraction // CC license 2.0

Happy Thanksgiving from the Photo Archives. We hope you will enjoy this array of Phasianidae. 

© The Field Museum, Z78603.

Guans, Grouse, Turkey and Quails, Mound Builderand other birds. Taxidermy: Ernst Gramatzki, Background painting: Patrick Gulley according to Theatres of Nature.

11x14 album print

1934 

Pangolin foetus

Some red pandas(Ailurus fulgens) study skins+skull at the museum. 

Taxidermy Tuesday, Don’t forget to clean your trunk!

Even our big elephants need a good cleaning once in a while. 

© The Field Museum, GN78973.

Cleaning the Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. 

4x5 negative 

5/26/1952 

Big kitty. African lion (Panthera leo) passed at the zoo yesterday - our turn for continuing education! Fingers crossed we can film the prep! (at The Field Museum)