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This article explores taxidermy as an interesting example of human-animal relations through a study of its incorporation into the later nineteenth and early twentieth century domestic interior. Occupying a liminal space that speaks to life and to death, often posed within an operational aesthetic of wildness, yet firmly captured in domestic confines, taxidermy offers valuable insight into how the geography of home depicted the dynamics of empire, gender and consumption, as well as cogitating on the the animal as a scientific and artistic presence. Usefully building on John Berger’s contention that urban industrialism encouraged both the disappearance and the multiplication of animals in human life, this study highlights the way in which a decorative paradox of dead wild things found a place in the British home in the form of naturalist mounts, hunting trophies and other consumer items. Approached as engineered artefacts of animal capital, the fantastic beasts of ‘the great indoors’ exemplify the convoluted (and often contradictory) relations between humans and other species in the modern world.

The Shanghai Museum, which was established by the primarily British and American expatriate-led North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1874 and continued to operate until 1952, had a major influence on the popularization of natural history knowledge in China. It contributed to training the first generation of Chinese taxidermists, many descendants of whom continue even today to hold positions in academic institutions related to natural history in the country. Moreover, the Museum's habitat dioramas, in particular, played a significant role in raising public awareness about environmental issues among local and foreign residents of Shanghai. This paper traces the salient aspects of the Museum's history, focusing on the key individuals involved in its development and the contributions that it made to the production, dissemination and popularization of natural history knowledge and techniques.

For me, so much of black being is bound up with a conundrum, dilemma, on an ontological level, we talk about it, argue about it often times…For me personally, I think black being is intrinsically b...

Lipid oxidation, commonly known as fat burn, is a serious problem in taxidermy collections across the world. The zoological collections at the Natural History Museum in London, UK, are no exception...

What role do museums play in elevating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event within public consciousness? How is an increasing awareness of human-made extinctions and global biodiversity loss transformin...

The Chincoteague pony swim is a cherished tradition in Chincoteague, Virginia, where noble saltwater cowboys round up wild horses to be sold at auction the next day. The island thrives off this event’s economic impact, which is amplified through Marguerite Henry’s series “Misty of Chincoteague”, allowing the pony’s fame to reach all corners of the world. The tradition is rooted in Chincoteague culture, but several different ethical aspects come into question after critical consideration. The islander’s economic dependence and pride in the ponies and yearly round up act as a disguise for these ethical quandaries, through the practice of modern myth making. This paper explores concepts of breed, the state of being wild vs. free, language surrounding horses, and hidden symbols within the swims organization to uncover the covert way in which Chincoteague culture upholds colonial values.

PurposeThis article unveils the similarities of today's space production systems with taxidermy. Giving examples from the transformation of natural environment during the history of Mannahatta (Manhattan), the article discusses the process of metamorphosis of habitats and ecosystems to anthropocentric artificial objects.Design/methodology/approachReferencing Lefebvre, urbanization is conceptualized as the production of abstract space that ultimately stifles life; by analogy, space taxidermy.FindingsUsing the analogy of taxidermy and abstract space production processes, the article introduces the necessity and the principles of restoring natural habitats.Originality/valueRe-writing the urban and architectural history of Manhattan by focusing on four different scenes from its life-span, the article introduces a novel; a new narrative of the history of the city from the perspective of human-nature relations and the various ways habitats were shaped on this island during history.

This paper analyzes the contemporary art practice of rogue taxidermy. Specifically, I look at the rogue taxidermy of Sarina Brewer, an artist who utilizes sensationalist aesthetics and representations found in historical sideshows alongside unconventional forms of taxidermy to critique historical and contemporary forms of body display. I discuss the material histories that informed and shaped the practice of taxidermy and how taxidermy was (and continues to be) bound up with a complex history of human and nonhuman animal exploitation. I analyze the interconnections between nonhuman animal taxidermy display and the historical preservation, study, and exhibition of postmortem human bodies in museums. The ethical implications of using nonhuman animal bodies as objects for political art entangle rogue taxidermy artists within the domination of nonhuman animals (alive and dead). The act of using postmortem nonhuman animal materials in artistic sculpture makes rogue taxidermy artists complicit in the history of modernity that used various bodies to outline “undesirable” racial and physiological variances. Furthermore, I analyze the subversive potential of Brewer’s sculptures to differently reconstruct sculptures of lusus naturae – from past representations – but, also, address the risky complexity of staging “monstrosity” in contemporary rogue taxidermy art. I conclude that the access and permission to place nonhuman animal bodies on display – from the outset – shows a normalization of human domination over nonhuman animal bodies, but argue that Sarina Brewer’s art, in various instances, critiques exploitation through multiple forms of body display.

Статья посвящена изменениям образности таксидермических объектов в музеях естественной истории. На ряде случаев прослеживаются связи этих изменений с трансформациями сети разнородных элементов – научных теорий и парадигм, музея, национальной политики, моральных представлений. Таксидермический объект понимается как объект науки, обладающий собственной материальностью и историей, музей – как пространство репрезентации природы, научных категорий и морально- политических идей. Таксидермия входит в музей естественной истории в XVIII веке ценой стирания своей художественности и искусственности в пользу объективной репрезентации «самой» природы. В контексте географических открытий и колониальных завоеваний чучела позволяли решить проблему удаленного во времени и пространстве наблюдения. Благодаря натурализации удается превратить чучело, теперь анонимное и стандартизированное, в воплощение таксона линнеевской систематики, неотделимой от соображений государственного управления ресурсами. Эта сцепка проявлялась в организации пространства экспозиции. В XIX веке с изменением принципа систематики, разработкой идеи организма в таксидермическую экспозицию через диорамы и биологические группы вводится измерение жизни. На конкретном примере демонстрируется использование таксидермических диорам в качестве инструмента морально-политической субъективации индивидов. В середине XX века наступает упадок таксидермии. Актуальная наука меняется и уходит из музеев естественной истории, разрушается колониальная система, критически переосмысливается отношение к колониальному наследию и животным, развиваются кинотехника и телевидение. Чучела становятся нежеланными артефактами жестокой политики и эстетики прежней эпохи и в большей степени объектами критических исследований и истории науки, чем науки. Музеи же, теряя финансирование и посетителей, оказываются в дважды противоречивом положении. Во-первых, между антиисторической натурализирующей научностью и историчностью денатурализованных экспонатов. Во-вторых, между неоднозначными эстетикой и историей таксидермии и изменившимся моральным порядком. Помимо других способов они пытаются разрешить эти противоречия путем переинтерпретации таксидермической экспозиции в рамках экологической повестки и при помощи точечных материально-дискурсивных вмешательств, превращающих чучела в аллегории вымирания и поврежденной природы. Этот ход позволяет удержаться в границах естественно-научного дискурса, одновременно обращаясь к моральному чувству посетителя. Однако при этом он воспроизводит мифологему «золотого века», основанную на противопоставлении природы и культуры, естественного и искусственного. На этом фоне выделяются другие траектории чучел в музее. Во-первых, художественные интервенции на территории музея, обращающиеся к таксидермии и шире архиву естественной истории. В таких случаях музей делегирует художникам право критической рефлексии по поводу научной идеологии и власти. Приводится ряд примеров таких интервенций. Во-вторых, таксидермические коллекции новых типов, изначально создаваемые не как плод объективирующего и систематизирующего подхода науки, а как проявление систематичности насилия и новой природы, безразличной к упомянутым выше оппозициям. Такая таксидермия может стать инструментом осмысления новой природы в эпоху, столь неудачно названную антропоценом, и рабочим объектом постгуманистической образности.The article is devoted to the transformations of the imagery of taxidermic objects in natural history museums. By examining several cases these transformations are linked to changes in a network of heterogeneous contexts - scientific theories and paradigms, the role of the museum, national politics, and public morals. While discussing the topic a taxidermic object is understood as an object of science with its own materiality and history and science museum is considered as a space for the representation of nature, scientific categories, and moral and political ideas, and as an instrument of collective empiricism. The history of taxidermy in a museum is the history of erasing its artistry and artificiality in favor of an objective representation of nature “itself". This naturalization makes it possible to turn the stuffed animal, now anonymous and standardized, into a taxon of Linnaean taxonomy, inseparable from considerations of public resource management. The consequences of such entry into the museum for the visual nature of taxidermy are written out. Next, we consider the change in taxonomy in the XIX century and the introduction of the idea of life in taxidermic exposition through dioramas and biological groups. A concrete example demonstrates the use of taxidermic dioramas as a tool for moral and political transformation of individuals through the aura-like experience of nature. In the middle of the XX century, the decline of taxidermy begins. Due to the withdrawal of up-to-date science from natural history museums, changes in politics, collective imagination, and the ethics of dealing with colonial heritage and nature, museums are losing funding and visitors and are gradually shifting to the periphery of culture. It is shown that they find themselves in a twice contradictory position between their own anti-historical and naturalizing scientific nature and the historicity of denaturalized exhibits, between the ambiguous aesthetics, history of taxidermy and the changed moral order. Museums tried to resolve these contradictions and return to the current culture by including in the communication about the environmental agenda and the environmental reinterpretation of taxidermy exposition with the help of occasional material and discursive interventions that turn stuffed animals into allegories of extinction. This move allows them to stay within the boundaries of the natural science discourse of preservation species diversity, while simultaneously appealing to the moral sense of the visitor and influencing the collective sensibility. At the same time, it reproduces the mythologem of the "golden age", based on the opposition between nature and culture, natural and artificial. Thus, these contradictions are not completely resolved. The first possible way further are artistic interventions on the territory of the museum, in which the Museum delegates to artists the right of critical reflection on scientific ideology and power. A number of examples of such interventions are provided and analyzed. The second way are new taxidermy collections, initially created not as a result of the objectifying approach of science, but as a manifestation of systematic violence and a new nature, indifferent to the above-mentioned oppositions. Such taxidermy can become a tool for understanding the new nature in an era so aptly called the anthropocene, and a working object of posthumanistic imagery.

In this artistic contribution, New York-based German artist Heide Hatry offers pictures of her sculpture series Imagine It Thick In Your Own Hair. According to Hatry, the project was intended to make people aware of the tragedy and motivate them to help clean up the disaster BP created in 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon spill. Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs, and cremated remains. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, death, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.

In lieu of material encounters, nonhuman spectres are made sense of through spectacles, imageries speculated upon with their own geographies and affects. This paper explores histories of trophy hunting in the Spanish Pyrenees, illustrating the emergence of the spectacular in relation to contemporary ideals of nature for hunters, in particular questioning the material implications of hunting for the extinction of the bucardo (or Pyrenean ibex). Theoretically, this paper converses Jacques Derrida’s metaphor of spectrality and Guy Debord’s conceptualisation of the spectacle to understand how hunting ghost animals removes them from particular ecological contexts. Trophy hunting and taxidermic practice serves to produce spectacles of animals at the interface of life and death, detaching them from temporal linearities, and allowing trophy animals to speak to broader sentiments of mastery over landscape. The bucardo was a ghostly figure prior to its extinction, famously difficult to encounter and kill by the 19th century, and as such its absence was marked through trophies to infer its broader presence in the landscape. I trace the changing significances of spectres and spectacles through the development of photographic technologies; prior to the camera’s spread and widespread use, spectral spectacles were produced through hunting practice. A typology is offered for the sensing of ghosts in their cultural contexts: mourning, or the attempt to ontologise remains; marking, or the conditional attribution of language to the spectral; and working, the means through which the ghost transforms itself or is transformed.

The only known museum specimen of Tahiti Sandpiper Prosobonia leucoptera, held at Naturalis, Leiden, until now has been considered to be the type collected by J. R. Forster during the second voyage of Captain James Cook (1772–75). However, using archival and published sources, we were able to trace the specimen only back to 1848. Nevertheless, based on a comparison of its taxidermy with material of known provenance, we conclude that it is likely that Anders Sparrman, a member of Cook's second voyage, was involved in mounting the specimen.

The capercaillie as one of the most important hunting objects in Russia has not yet been included in the list of esti-mated hunting trophies due to the lack of an acceptable assessment methodology. The aim of the work is to develop a method for assessing the trophy advantages of a capercaillie. The objects of the study were morphological indicators which expressed the size and the age of the birds caught. The study involved 39 stuffed animals of capercaillie, 47 carcasses of freshly caught birds and 105 skulls from research collections. Measurement of taxidermy products (stuffed animals and museum carcasses) gives inaccurate information about the fowl caught. It is preferable to use the skull of a male capercaillie as a trophy. In the system of the International Council for the Hunting and Preservation of the Wildlife (CIC) the traditional measurements of the skull are the maximum length and width. In trophy animals, the scull size sufficiently reflects the sum of these indicators, therefore they are chosen for trophy assessment. For capercaillie, the correlation of similar pro-meters with body weight was not so close r = 0.489. In authors’ opinion, the assessment method should include the size of the interorbital space as an addi-tional parameter. This measurement is used in methods for determining the age of capercaillies caught. The formula for scoring is the product of the interorbital space by the sum of the maximum length and width of the skull. The correlation coeffi-cient between the trophy rating by this formula and the bird weight in this study is rm = 0.931, and the trophy rating and age rv = 0.920. The intervals of the final points for awarding the medals are: bronze  55-59.99 points, silver  60-64.99, gold  more than 65 points. This assessment system was successfully tested at two exhibitions of hunting trophies held in the Kirov region in 2017, and was approved by expert commissions.

The Sheals taxidermy business in Belfast became famous for the quality of their work. Three of their order books survive, recording jobs done for named customers from January 1897 to December 1911, and January 1919 to January 1920 inclusive. Such records are extremely scarce as few taxidermists appear to have kept any regular paperwork until recent times, and little information has survived about such businesses from the heyday of commercial taxidermy. This paper reviews the types of taxidermy undertaken, species handled and the customer base for what became one of the leading taxidermists in Ireland, with an international reputation.

The paper considers the cultural exploitation of bears, especially white ones, from the late sixteenth century to the present, both in drama and literary fiction and in the bear pits, theatres, circuses, zoos, and natural habitats in which real biological bears have found themselves mythologized and marketed. Beginning and ending with Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson’s art project nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2006), the argument explores the use and abuse of fictive and real white bears in the changing contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and performance history, eighteenth and nineteenth century colonialism, and present day anxieties about habitat degradation and global warming, and also in the light of the perennial and “almost inescapable anthropomorphism” which, as Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson point out, causes us to see the bear as “a potent symbol” rather than a creature with its own life experience and autonomy. In addition to nanoq: flat out and bluesome, which attempts to break its audience out of that mind-set by confronting them with the mortal remains and individual histories of 34 taxidermic bears, the paper discusses George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (c. 1594), the anonymous 1590s play Mucedorus, Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), Robert Bage’s Jacobin novel Hermsprong (1796), James Hogg’s novella The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1834), Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995), Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016), and Martin Rowe’s The Polar Bear in the Zoo (2013).

Despite the socially committed attitude many documentary artists take, documentaries often end up underpinning a large-scale epistemological enterprise linked to global capitalism and Western colon...

This paper is written as a way of thinking through the process of reification when recording the performance of song. It comes from the place of practice. I am a songwriter. The possibilities and mediums of the recording environment offer a unique palette to the songwriter who produces (in the vernacular of Popular music), but increasingly, with each wave of technology, the relationship between recording and performance is made more and more complex. My current research is focusing on this relationship and what it means both practically and in terms of the making of meaning and role of performance in the studio.\ud \ud Having established the status of a recording as facsimile of performance through an unpicking of the process of capture and playback, we see the ‘ontological catastrophe’ implicit within it. This is the basis from which the analogue of taxidermy begins to feel like a useful way to make analysis of the recorded performance (if we allow the performance to play the role of living animal).\ud \ud Drawing primarily on Rachel Poliquin’s writing on taxidermy and making use of Roland Barthes, Evan Eisenberg, Kim Cascone and Jacques Attali, the paper seeks to unravel the various and fluxed ontologies of recorded song and the potential for the making of meaning within the production environment. This moves toward an analysis of the effect of production on performance and ultimately how performance can be manifest within recorded media/medium.

Bringing greater visibility to the emerging category of endling taxidermy, this article traces the histories of taxidermic preservations and biotechnological interventions that lead up to, and follow, the extinction of the Pinta Island tortoise. As the last of the line, Lonesome George (the last individual of the Pinta Island species) is an endling that has been rendered hypervisible in the public imagination as an icon of conservation. Yet the taxidermic form of Lonesome George is also accompanied by an enlarged and conflicting sense of trepidation and optimism about the future of species biodiversity in the wake of the sixth mass extinction. By gathering together the narrative strands of tortoise extinction in the Galapagos Islands from a diverse range of natural scientific, nautical, and literary histories, this article explores how the visual display of endling taxidermy shapes the origins, endings, and future trajectories of extinct species lines.

Taxidermied animals provide an important source of information about the natural world, but failure to understand their reality status may result in missed learning opportunities for museum visitors. This study explored 4–10-year-old children’s and adults’ (N = 207) reality status judgments and biological and authenticity property attributions for a taxidermied rabbit during a museum visit. The aim was to examine their understanding of its former status as a living animal and its current status as an authentic piece of natural history, under different presentation conditions: (a) as a touchable exhibit; (b) inside an exhibition case—untouchable; and (c) in an experimental context paired with a toy rabbit—both touchable. Analysis revealed that there was an increase with age both in judgments that taxidermy was real and authentic and in accuracy of biological property attributions. The toy condition resulted in more accurate reality judgments, whereas the touchable condition resulted in more accurate biological property attributions. There was no effect of age or condition on authenticity property attributions. Accuracy of biological property attributions was also associated with reality status judgments, whereby understanding the real and authentic nature of taxidermy was associated with understanding its biological status. Implications for the development of biological cognition and museum learning are discussed.

The owners of the great machines of monopoly capital - the so-called means of production - were, with excellent reason, at the forefront of nature work - because it was one of the means of production of race, gender and class. From the point of view of Teddy Bear Patriarchy, race suicide was a clinical manifestation whose mechanism was the differential reproductive rates of anglo-saxon v. ‘non-white’ immigrant women. Over one million children per year in New York were looking at ‘nature cabinets’ put together by the museum. Osborn summarized the fond hopes of educators like himself in his claim that children who pass through the museum’s halls ‘become more reverent, more truthful, and more interested in the simple and natural laws of their being and better citizens of the future through each visit’. The leaders of the American Museum of Natural History would insist that they were trying to know and to save nature, reality.

This chapter documents the taxidermy and exhibition of the sled dogs who had reached and returned from the South Pole, and who had died in Argentina. Included in the documentation is the attempted preservation of the dog skins in Buenos Aires, the transportation of the dog skins to Norway, the taxidermist’s challenging work to restore the decaying skins, and the public exhibition of the sled dogs at the Zoological Museum in Kristiania and later as part of the Ski Association’s Jubilee Exhibition of 1914, which celebrated the 100-year anniversary of Norway’s constitution. Personal and official letters of correspondence from Roald Amundsen, Leon Amundsen, and The Association for the Promotion of Skiing, as well as reference to the letters from the Norwegian Expedition’s ship captains, from February 1913 to October 1914, are used to tell this part of the history—specifically how the dogs were used after their deaths.

This reflection piece interrogates what a focus on movement can bring to understanding more-than-human relationality in a museum space. It does so by zooming in on choreography and taxidermy as practices that both enable movement and kinesthetic becoming. It focusses on “Send out a Pulse!”, an artistic intervention for the Australian Museum in Sydney. Said piece is a nontraditional, choreographic audio walk made by the author as part of “How to Not be a Stuffed Animal”, an interdisciplinary, artistic-scholarly duo. Following a flightway of birds’ extinction stories, ways to activate response-ability through multispecies movement will be explored.

As in other countries in Central and Western Europe, the return of wolves to Switzerland since the mid-1990s has generated intense debates and has taken place in various fields in which material and immaterial entities come together in new multispecies networks. This paper focuses on one of those fields: wolf taxidermy. Based on interviews and fieldwork in taxidermy workshops and Swiss nature museums, the main question here is whether there are moments of wolfish agency in this unquestionably human-dominated process of taxidermy. A praxeological, performative and relational understanding of agency is laid out to explore this question. The selective and restricted agentic capacities wolves perform – mostly as a sort of offstage agents absent from the workshop itself – within the sociomaterial networks of wolf taxidermy is captured with the term interference.

Heywood, Peter (2020): Sexual dimorphism of body size in taxidermy specimens of Equus quagga quagga Boddaert (Equidae). Journal of Natural History 53 (45-46): 2757-2761, DOI: 10.1080/00222933.2020.1736678, URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00222933.2020.1736678

What is the provenance of the specimen of the Hippotragus leucophaeus (Pallas, 1766) (Bloubok, Bluebuck, Blue Antelope) in the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris? This article argues that new archival evidence, an examination of the specimen, and a critical re-examination of claims by Mohr suggest that the specimen came from the French traveller and ornithologist Francois Levaillant (also written Le Vaillant) and not from a specimen supplied by Gordon that Mohr and Rookmaaker speculated was taken from the Stadholder of Holland's collection in 1795.

This chapter offers a reading of Green Lion, a novel by contemporary South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes. The novel deals with pressing issues in world-ecology, revealing dialectical interconnections between historical processes of extinction, conservation and the commodification of natural forms. The story revolves around the project to revive an extinct native species, the dark-maned Cape lion, through a breeding programme in Cape Town zoo. The project, however, is destined to fail and living lions are in the end replaced by a taxidermy collection. The failures of conservation, however, do not exhaust Rose-Innes’s narrative, which also presents non-synchronic temporalities—anticipatory, utopian and mystical—driving the clandestine activities of the Green Lion, a secret society of animal lovers.

William Smyth, unable to get work in a New Zealand museum, ran a commercial taxidermy business at Caversham, Dunedin, from about 1873 to 1911 or 1912. His two decades of correspondence with Thomas Frederic Cheeseman at the Auckland Museum provide a case study of Smyth's professional interaction with one of New Zealand's main museums. We have used this and other sources to paint a picture of Smyth's activities and achievements during a time when there was great interest in New Zealand birds but few local taxidermists to preserve their bodies. Besides the Auckland Museum, Smyth supplied specimens to various people with museum connections, including Georg Thilenius (Germany) and Walter Lawry Buller (New Zealand). Smyth was probably self-taught, and his standards of preparation and labelling were variable, but he left a legacy for the historical documentation of New Zealand ornithology by the large number of his bird specimens that now reside in public museum collections in New Zealand and elsewhere.

As taxidermy increased in prominence in American natural history museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of trying to replicate nature through mounts and displays became increasingly central. Crude practices of overstuffing skins gave way to a focus on the artistic modelling of animal skins over a sculpted plaster and papier-mâché form to create scientifically accurate and aesthetically pleasing mounts, a technique largely developed at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. Many of Ward's taxidermists utilized their authority in taxidermy practices as they formally organized into the short-lived Society of American Taxidermists (1880-1883) before moving into positions in natural history museums across the United States. Through examinations of published and archival museum materials, as well as historic mounts, I argue that taxidermists at these museums reached an unspoken consensus concerning how their mounts would balance pleasing aesthetics with scientific accuracy, while adjusting their practices as they considered the priorities of numerous stakeholders. Taxidermists negotiated through administrative priorities, legacies of prominent craftsmen, and a battery of instructive materials, all claiming some authority as to what proper taxidermy could—and should—be. The shifts in taxidermy authority revealed truths about what taxidermy could mean, questions of how taxidermists identified themselves within the profession and to outsiders, practices for presenting taxidermy to museum visitors, and techniques for representing nature. This project traces the paths of consensus for developing techniques to construct museum taxidermy from the 1883 end of the S.A.T until the founding of the Technical Section of the American Association of Museums (AAM) in 1929. Two critics who book-end this project—Robert Wilson Shufeldt, an army doctor, naturalist, and museum critic, and Lawrence Vail Coleman, director of preparation and exhibition, American Museum of Natural History, and director of the American Association of Museums—identified similar characteristics that suggest a like-minded approach as to what constituted proper museum taxidermy among museum taxidermists. Museum taxidermy carried with it a set of characteristics: accuracy and a pleasing aesthetic for Shufeldt; feeling, unity, action, balance, reality, and size for Coleman. These two sets of criteria complemented each other as they reified consensus. What complicated this finding was that taxidermists themselves did not acknowledge them specifically, only relating to them in passing, if at all. Regardless, taxidermic practice seemed to be consistent across these decades. This study complicates the nature of scientific representation, in that it focuses a great deal on its artistry. Museum taxidermy is supposed to be an instructional tool, guiding museum visitors in the way they approach nature, and especially how they see animals, and focusing on teaching the science of animal behavior, biodiversity, and habitat, to name a few. It is a scientific object, representing the most up-to-date research in the field, but consensus surrounding it is not scientifically measurable. Instead, taxidermy consensus happened in hallways and back rooms (both literal and metaphorical), with little written down, and the mounts as the most substantial evidence that is had been achieved. Nevertheless, taxidermists negotiated the array of stakeholders present—museum administrators, naturalists, collectors, and the public—as they fashioned mounts that were both accurate and aesthetically pleasing representations of animal lives. Doctor of Philosophy In this project I look at museum taxidermy in United States natural history museums, from the 1880s to 1930s. In that 50-year span, taxidermy practices coalesced around a primary technique for mounting animal skins, using a wooden form and papier-mâché as the structure for stretching the skin over it. But there was more to this consensus than using the same techniques, as two critics who book-end this project—Robert Wilson Shufeldt, an army doctor, naturalist, museum critic, etc., and Lawrence Vail Coleman, director of preparation and exhibition, American Museum of Natural History, and director of the American Association of Museums—identified similar characteristics that suggest a like-minded approach as to what constituted proper museum taxidermy among museum taxidermists. I argue in this project that taxidermists reached an unspoken consensus around their craft that balanced scientific accuracy with a pleasing aesthetic, to achieve mounts that would be both scientifically meaningful and not off-putting to museum visitors. Museum taxidermy carried with it a set of characteristics: accuracy and a pleasing aesthetic for Shufeldt; feeling, unity, action, balance, reality, and size for Coleman. And these two complement each other as they reify consensus. What complicated this finding was that taxidermists themselves did not acknowledge them specifically, only relating to them in passing, if at all. Regardless, taxidermy seemed to be consistent across these decades. This study complicates the nature of scientific representation, in that it focuses a great deal on its artistic nature. Museum taxidermy is supposed to be an instructional tool, guiding museum visitors in the way they approach nature, and especially how they see animals. Museum taxidermy generally shies away from terrifying visitors with animal size and ferocity, focusing instead on teaching the science of animal behavior, biodiversity, and habitat, to name a few. In this sense, it is a scientific object, representing the most up-to-date research in the field. Consensus in the realm of taxidermy, and in scientific representation more broadly, is not scientific consensus, but more consistent with an artistic approach, like a posteriori recognitions of characteristics unique to artists or artistic movements. Taxidermy consensus happened in hallways and back rooms, with little written down, and the mounts as the most substantial evidence. Nevertheless, taxidermists negotiated the array of stakeholders present—museum administrators, naturalists, collectors, and the public—as they consistently made these mounts both accurate and aesthetically pleasing. And they still make sense when we see them, as they can be repurposed to tell new stories consistent with current understandings of animal lives.

Museum dioramas are widely recognised as historic visual tropes used to frame the grandeur of the outside world within an interior viewing space. With the development of digital technologies, data projection and soundscape have increasingly replaced diorama production as a means to transform these once static-animal-posed-in-painted- habitat with immersive interiors that engage the visual and aural senses alike. Andre Breton proposes that two modes of consciousness exist: an exterior world of facts and an interior world of emotions. These interiors and exteriors produce an interface and exchange. An invitation to respond to the interior of RMIT University’s First Site gallery provided an opportunity to experiment with the three traditional dioramic elements used to bring the exterior world into an interior employing taxidermy, model making and set painting. By engaging digital technologies in response to these three elements, I developed a sensorial interior, where the exterior world of facts was set into dialogue with the interior world of emotion. A physical encounter that expanded on ‘interior’ as an experiential, relational, phenomenal and emotive space.

A description by William Jardine of Applegirth of the state of taxidermy in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh draws attention to the agency of the University of Edinburgh’s Janitor, John Wilson, i...

The Leverian Museum was one of the eighteenth century’s most important natural history collections. While its significance has been discussed from a range of perspectives, little attention has been paid to the museum’s representation in children’s literature. This article examines two such works: The School-Room Party (1800) and Visits to the Leverian (c. 1805). Driven by pedagogic agendas, these texts suggest that the museum could challenge, as well as inform, its visitors. Focussing on the affective and ethical responses that the museum elicits, this article proposes that these works complicate and enrich current understandings of the period’s writing for children.

This essay explores the relationship between cinema and taxidermy, and some of the ways in which artists and experimental film-makers have used the moving image to engage with the ramifications of stuffing and preserving animals. It is argued that the taxidermied creature’s eerie mixture of death and life has particular resonance for film-makers with an interest in slowness and stasis. James Benning’s 2014 film natural history, which was shot behind the scenes at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, serves as a central focus. As with other films by Benning, natural history can be understood as both structuralist and a landscape film. The film is compared to works depicting stuffed animals by other experimental film-makers who explore stillness and slowness; it is proposed that such film-makers can be conceived of as taxidermists. Finally, the article looks at the complex relations between cinema, taxidermy and sound. The aural dimension of Benning’s film, missing from many other artists’ engagements with taxidermy, enables a richer exploration of its operations.

This article analyzes the comic “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987) by Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano within the urban context and modern history of Barcelona. Two specific sites are instrumental to this reading: Ildefons Cerda's nineteenth-century design of the Eixample district and the development of the Parc de la Ciutadella. In its story, formal presentation and iconic signification, the comic draws upon and further contributes to the striking presence of animals within Barcelona's cityscape and its urban imaginary. As with the historical examples of a mammoth statue and a taxidermy whale, the movement of Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano's crocodile through the comic's representation of Barcelona draws attention to persisting contradictions surrounding public space, knowledge of the natural world and Catalan urban identity. This study employs an urban cultural studies perspective rooted in the work of Lefebvrian theorist Manuel Delgado Ruiz. Its sections analyze the relation of form and content in the...

Summary. The ‘I’iwi Drepanis coccinea was discovered during James Cook's third circumnavigation (1776–80) and described by G. Forster in 1781. Several possibly authentic specimens and data sources linked to the original expedition exist. However, investigations into preparation style of the various ‘I’iwi specimens in question identified five different workshops and thus provenances. Only one specimen (at Gottingen, Germany) can unequivocally be considered authentic Cook material.

Natural history products formed an important, but little studied, component of the globalization of trade in the mid nineteenth century. The trade, specifically in zoology, occurred in the face of considerable challenges. It penetrated some of the more remote areas of the globe; its products were heterogeneous and difficult to price; and exchange occurred among scientists, commercial traders, and collectors, each of whom had their own particular practices and mores. This article charts the dimensions of this trade and offers explanations about the ways in which its complexities were addressed through major developments in taxidermy, taxonomy, transport and business logistics, alternative forms of exchange, and trust-based networks. More broadly, our work speaks to current developments in global history, imperial networks, and the history of scientific collecting.

A 19th-century dried and stuffed type sunfish at the Natural History Museum in London (UK) was collapsing under its own weight and was in poor physical condition. The effort to stabilize and rehouse the specimen by removing the stuffing and restoring the skin is described here. The thickness and rigidity of the skin, as well as mechanical equipment failure during treatment, presented challenges during the restoration project. Although the aesthetics are still suboptimal, the integrity of this scientifically important specimen was maintained. Furthermore, the specimen has been stabilized on a combination internal and external frame system and is now far more maneuverable.

An analysis is presented of the material, some 308 items mainly British birds and mammals, submitted for preservation by account holders of R. & G. W. Raine Brothers, taxidermists in Carlisle, between 1918 and 1943. Possible impacts on local bird and mammal populations are discussed.

Geographers are demonstrating increasing interest in the power and significance of craft and artisanal practices. However, within this scholarship very little attention has been paid to theorising or tracing the conveyance of craft practices over time and place. This paper seeks to address this deficit by demonstrating how craft conveyance has been achieved through historical geographies of apprenticeship. To do so the paper firstly reviews how the figure of the apprentice and the forms and geographies apprenticeship have been recently reconfigured. Secondly, and by drawing on the work of anthropologists and geographers, it argues that the model of learning between master and apprentice is more dynamic, relational and context-dependant than that espoused in Richard Sennett's seminal text on craftsmanship. Moreover, while geographers have begun to think through how craft practices become sedimented in place over successive generations, the main contribution of this paper is to think and work through how craft practices travel from place to place over successive generations. Specifically this is to examine how the corporeal and material practices of a workshop gain not just temporal duration but also spatial extension. This will be achieved empirically by retracing how the ‘Wardian-style’ of taxidermy practice travelled from London to Glasgow through the movements of Wardian apprentice Charles Kirk. Following non-representational theorisations of practice, and what I shall term the ‘journeyings’ of Kirk, the paper demonstrates that rather than passively absorbing the ‘secrets’ of a workshop the apprentice actively co- and re-produces its corporeal and material practices and carries them forward where they are actively reworked into and by new communities and ecologies of practice. The paper concludes by emphasising the relevance and resonance of apprenticeship for rethinking and retracing craft conveyance.