This is my favorite human, Tim Bovard. He’s the one on the right wearing the mask. (The other one is a wax ape head but we’ll get to that in a minute.)
Tim is the Museum Taxidermist at The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles @nhmla and has been there over 35 years! He literally knows where all the bodies are buried.
Tim is also my mentor, whom I affectionately call my ‘Taxidermy Dad’. He’s become that for a lot of us; his volunteers, students at Prey Taxidermy and co-workers. I sure do miss him right now, so I was pleased as punch when I got this photo from him.
The other fella in the photo is the face of a male Orangutang that was preserved via a process called ‘wax infiltration’. It’s based on an old medical technique for preserving soft tissue by slowly replacing the moisture with wax.
It’s very complicated and finicky and we’re all going to make Tim come on my Instagram live ‘Dead-Stream’ and explain it to us one day.
I miss Tim and all of the wonderful & weird people in my life. I’m grateful for you guys more and more everyday. I know we’ll all be together again soon.
Dodos, Dinos and anything long dead can be recreated by Gary Staab of Staab Studios.
Join us on tomorrow’s ‘Dead-Stream’ Monday May 4th at 12pm pst with paleoartist, Gary Staab. You can watch here.
You can see his creations at museums the world over and also on PBS’ NOVA special ‘Iceman’.
Gary is going to take us on a tour of his studio and tell us how he takes fossils and turns them into tangible creatures. He’s like a time detective slash artist.
Join us live or watch The Dead-Stream for 24 hours after the live feed in my Stories.
One of my early inspirations for becoming a taxidermist was the Victorian era obsession with the art. This piece was created by me a few years ago as an homage to that era.
Victorian taxidermy is said to have been stemmed from a newfound interest in the natural world from the emerging middle class. This new middle class now had time & expendable income to collect and even create ‘parlor art’ ; taxidermy, wax flowers, shell collections, fossil collections and more.
They began collections known as ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’ inspired by their newfound ability to travel and visit museums. In fact, before the Victorian era, museums were closed spaces only accessible to members of the aristocracy, academia and other privileged classes.
Today, while museums and education are considered open to all, we must remember there is still privilege in getting access. We all have to do our part to support programs for the underprivileged and also minorities in STEM. Science and education is for everyone!
We are all just marionettes. Here you can see me pulling on the tendons of this Toucan foot and manipulating the digits. Fascinating!
I’ve pulled the tendons out of the bottom of the foot in order to remove them from the specimen. This makes room up the back of the foot for a wire in the mounting step of taxidermy.
I remember the first time I pulled the tendons on a bird. It was a hawk and the talons closed around my fingers. I jumped up and thought it was alive for a second! Today, I love showing this to students and seeing the fascination in their eyes.
I’m beyond honored to be interviewed on my favorite podcast, Ologies.
Ologies is the creation of science educator and sassy brain-queen, Alie Ward. If you’re not already a fan, you need to get this in your ears now! Just subscribe in your preferred podcast app! Or check out this LINK
I’m talking Penguinology, Plumology, Fearology and basically any other cool science subject you want to hear. Check out @ologies and @alieward
I just wanted to share about my very good friend Vahe. He is a master falconer and owner of @falconforce_falconry. In 2019 that means part of his job is providing sustainable pest management service to growers of cherries, blueberries and wine grapes.
He utilized different types of falcons/hawks for different types of jobs as well. Sometimes that means chasing off invasive Starlings from berries and other times that means clearing public spaces of pest birds.
“To watch the berries from green to the most vivid ripe blue and untouched by nuisance invasive birds in a period of 45 days is a gratifying spectacle.”
Check out his page to see beautiful photos from his work at @falconforce_falconry or head to www.FalconForce.com for falconry based bird abatement services.
Here is Olivia Miseroy posing a young Desert Tortoise for molding. Olivia uses this technique to make her gorgeous reptile replicas.
You can see where she has clay on the face to rebuild the eyelids and has inserted glass eyes. This is to ensure the eye detail looks good in her final mold.
After this specimen is posed, it is frozen and then molded in silicone.
Molding and casting are a big part of advanced taxidermy and used in many educational displays.
You can see more of Olivia’s work at @terrafaunadesign on Instagram
Here are some snaps from LA Science Weekend; an event by the New York Times & Atlas Obscura Society.
I was honored to be doing a workshop alongside the Moore Lab of Zoology about taxidermy for research and display. The guests were so fun and had so many great questions!
Also, I love working with the crew from the Moore Lab because it gives me the opportunity to ask my many bird questions to actual scientists. Getting an accurate piece of taxidermy is all about capturing natural behaviors and taxonomy.
Our Hummingbird cases from the Huntington exhibit even got to come out for an evening at the Line Hotel.
Did I mention we got to go to a Dino soirée at my alma mater, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles?
2019.02.22 | a lot of biology reviews lately, and I whipped up a simple, cute kidney ✨ sorry for the inactivity, school’s been crazy, but also thank you for 1k omg!!!
French-born and British-based, Marlene Huissoud developed the project “From Insects : an exploration of insect materials from the common honeybee and the Indian silkworm”. This collection of vessels from insect byproducts such as propolis was made by using a variety of glass techniques, including venetian artistry, glass blowing and engraving.
Fossil specimen on display at the American Museum of Natural History
Reconstruction by Hirokazu Tokugawa
When: Permian (~299 to 265 million years ago)
Where: North America
What: Cotylorhynchus is a member of one of the most basal groups of synapsids, the Caseidae. Cotylorhynchus was a herbivore, and reached lengths of up to 20 feet (~6 meters) long, with a massive barrel chest, putting weight estimates at around 2 tons. This animal is very large for its time… well at least its body is. Cotylorhynchus has one of the most extreme cases of ‘tiny head’ I have ever seen. Even more so than the sail-backed Edaphaosaurus! Which is closer to modern mammals than Cotylorhynchus is. It is one of the most primitive animals known that unambiguously falls on the synapsid lineage. It is so basal that it does not even have any differentiation seen in its dentition, though there are less teeth than found in the non synapsid contemporaries of this wee-headed creature.
Mounted reconstruction on display at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, Woodland Park, Colorado
Reconstruction by Charles Bonner
When: Cretaceous (~ 89 - 83 million years ago)
Where: North America
What:Saurodon is one of the large fish which swam though the Cretaceous Seaway, the marine waters that covered much of North America during the late Mesozoic. This particular species was ‘only’ about 8.5 feet (~2.6 meters) long, with a relatively skinny body and large pointed lower jaw. These features are what gives the family Saurodontidae the nick-name 'sword eels’. The Saurodontidae fall into the later group Ichthyodectidae, a completely extinct clade that contains some of the largest fish on record. Today the living relatives of these gigantic fishes are in the clade Osteoglossomorpha and are some of the largest bony fish that swim though today’s waters.
This was not a very specious group - there are only three described species - but they have been known to science for almost two-hundred years. The first Saurodontidaewas named in 1824 by Richard Harlan (the discover of Harlan’s ground sloth) - but was misidentified as the jaw of an extinct marine reptile. This was corrected only six years later when the first Saurodon specimen was found, and it was clear that the fragmentary specimen which was previously named belonged to a large fish, not a marine reptile. The use of the long lower jaw in Saurodon and its kin is not well understood, but it has been hypothesized that perhaps these predatory fish dug prey out from the deep muds at the bottom of the seaway.
Mounted specimen from American Museum of Natural History, and currently part of the traveling Extreme Mammals exhibit.
Reconstruction by Charles Knight
When: Eocene (~49 to 39 million years ago)
Where: North America
What:Uintatherium is one of the first large mammalian herbivores. It stood about 6 feet (~1.8 meters) high at the shoulder and was roughly 13 feet (~4 meters) long. This isn't that large for an animal today, but in the Eocene it was a giant! It lived in the lush sub-tropical forests of mid-Eocene North America, most likely eating a combination of terrestrial bushes and shrubs along with aquatic plants from lakes and marshes. Uintatherium has a nasty pair of upper canines, not what you would expect from a herbivore! It is thought that these teeth were involved in sexual display, as they appear to be much larger in males than females. Uintatherium vanishes from the fossil record in the late Eocene, at about the time the temperature of North America was falling and the vegetation was thinning out.
Uintatherium was also one of the fossils involved in the great ‘Bone Wars’ between Cope and Marsh. It was by far the largest of the fossils to come out of the Fort Bridger fossil localities in Wyoming (this fort gives its name to a land mammal age - The Bridgerian!), and thus highly prized. Cope and Marsh both applied multiple names to specimens from this region which would later prove to all belong to the same species. The name Uintatherium wasn’t even one applied by Cope OR Marsh. Joseph Leidy named this creature in 1872, just barely edging out Marsh’s names of Dinoceras and Tinoceras. So that particular battle in the bone wars was won by someone who didn’t even have much of an interesting in fighting!
Uintatherium is not thought to have any living descendants, it is possible that the Eocene Uintatherium was the last of its kin. However, the position of Uintatherium and its brethren (grouped as the Dinocerata) within the mammal family tree is highly uncertain. They are well accepted as placental mammals, but beyond that? It is highly debated, and in my opinion, nobody has really done a rigorous enough study to support any one position over another.
Mounted specimen from the Zhoukoudian Museum, Beijing.
Reconstruction by Mauricio Antón
When: Pliocene to Pleistocene (~ 5 million to .5 million years ago)
Where: Europe, Asia, and Africa
What:Pachycrocutais a prehistoric member of the Hyaenidae. Today hyenas are restricted to Africa and western Asia, but their fossil record has revealed they were once much more wide spread. Pachycrocuta has been found in Africa and Asia, but most specimens have been found in Europe, with many localities in the Iberian Peninsula. The largest species was Pachycrocutabrevirostris, which stood over 3 and a half feet (~100 cm) at the shoulder and is estimated to have weighed over 400 lbs (190 kg). This makes it about the size of a modern lioness! Cave deposits in both Spain and China have revealed multiple almost complete skeletons, suggesting that these animals lived in packs and utilized these caves as their dens.
As Pachycrocuta is even more heavyset and adapted for bone crunching than the living bone-crunching hyenas, it has been suggested that this fossil form was even more dependent on scavenging kills than living species. But there really is not much evidence to pack this up other than thought-experiments. As it appears that some large cat species were displaced when Pachycrocuta moved into their ranges, it is more likely it was a direct hunter that would take advantage of pre-killed remains when it could drive away other predators. Like 99% of carnivores today. The predator/scavenger divide is really not a fast or hard line at all. Even more evidence of hunting comes from the remains of interactions between PachycrocutaandHomo errectus. These two species overlapped and bones of our poor relative have been found in Pachycrocuta dens in China!
What: Louisella is a worm-type organism from the Burgess Shale formation in the Canadian Rockies of BC. This organism was about 12 inches (~30 centimeters) long, with a proboscis at its anterior end that could be inverted into the body or extruded. In the images above it is inverted into the body in the fossil specimen, but shown at its full extended length in the reconstruction. This structure was ringed by a series of spines with shorter and more robust spikes on the end of the proboscis. These structures would rub past one another as the animal extended and retracted its proboscis, allowing it to ‘chew’ its food. The rows of short fringes on one surface of Louisella are thought to possible have been the animal’s gills. This worm has been reconstructed as a burrowing and carnivorous creature, and due to the grinding capability afforded to it by its proboscis, it likely ate animals of a relatively large size.
Louisella is currently held as a stem fossil on the lineage leading to the Priapulida worms, also known as the 'Penis worms’. I swear I am not making that up. These worms are very rare even today, with less than 20 living species known. They, like their ancient relative, are burrowing creatures which hunt other invertebrates. Fossils of priapulid worms are also rare, only a handful of Louisella specimens are known. What is far more common though are their distinctive shaped burrows, which are sort of an interlocking L-shape. The appearance of this type of burrows is one of the biostratigraphic markers of the start of the Cambrian period.
