No, that’s not rogue taxidermy–that’s an actual stillborn two-headed fawn! It’s the only one known to be carried to full term; the rest were miscarried early. More details here.
Working on some ideas for a permanent shadow box arrangement. I like the idea of nests within hearts. Possum collected by Shadyufostudios.
Guess which dumbass made a conscious decision to leave their knife at basecamp only to find some barred owl street pizza an hour later. Real fresh, smelled like chicken when it’s been out too long and no flies so it really sucks that I couldn’t cut the feet off. Plucked all the clean feathers I could, probably looking ridiculous to people driving by, yanking pinions out of a big dead bird. Might go back to see if the feet are still salvageable, but the heat makes everything nasty fast; never found an owl so either way it’s cool to have those feathers.
GUYS I NEED HELP.
I bought this taxidermy on ebay and it’s vintage the seller said he didn’t know what it is so anyone who knows taxidermy plz help? I think it’s vintage?
‘While they were taking the [micro-CT] scan, they found that the dodo’s skull
was covered with lead shot pellets. The bird, they realized, had been
blasted from behind (though notably, the pellets were not able to
penetrate its thick skull).
The Museum of Natural History believed it knew the provenance of the Oxford dodo. Several live dodos were reportedly
brought to Europe in the 1600s (many of them subsequently suffered from
obesity, skewing our image of the dodo, but that’s another story). One
of these dodos supposedly lived in London and is mentioned in a 1638 anecdote. After its death, the creature was taxidermied and then acquired by a London museum…’
‘The shot to the head raises the question
whether the Oxford dodo comes from the purported living dodo, or if it
was one hunted in the wild. “There is now a mystery regarding how the
specimen came to be in Tradescant’s collection,” Paul Smith, the
director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, tells
Geggel.
It also begs the question: who killed the bird? In an interview with Nicola Davis at The Guardian, Smith says there’s no simple answer. “If
it was the bird that was in London in 1638, why would anyone just shoot
a dodo in London,” he says. “And if it was [shot] in Mauritius, which
is I suppose marginally more likely, there is a really serious question
about how it was preserved and transported back, because they didn’t
have many of the techniques that we use in the modern-day to preserve
soft tissues – and we know it came back with its feathers and its skin
intact.”’
This is a really interesting finding. A few other possibilities occurred to me:
1.
The animal survived being shot, and was captured at a later date 2. The animal was next to a conspecific when the latter was shot 3.
The animal became ill while in captivity, and was euthanized with a shot to the head
A dead bat still hanging from the ceiling of a cave.
Fun fact: When the muscles in a bat’s feet/legs relax, the foot closes. (Contrast to our hands, which open when the controlling muscles relax.) This is why bats can sleep—and die—upside down.
lovingdread 