Although Waterton was one of the most skilful taxidermists of his age (his superb specimens of birds and animals have remained pristine to this day), his reputation as a serious naturalist has been tarnished by his disturbing ability to combine and mould parts of nature into hallucinations. His creatures were satirical monstrosities crafted from bits and pieces of animals: his aim was not to fool the viewer into believing they were observing a work of nature but rather to make present his opinion on institutional corruption and religious perversion (Waterton was a Catholic living in a predominately Protestant
Image taken from the Wakefield Museum's website at which
the Nondescript is still on display after nearly 200 years.  country). Among his fraudulent creatures is an orangutan adorned with donkey’s ears called “Martin Luther” and the more poetically titled “Noctifer, or the Spirit of the Dark Ages, unknown in England before the Reformation” was crafted from the head of an eagle owl, the legs of a bittern, and the wings of a partridge. Even more elaborate was his tableau labelled as “John Bull and the National Debt,” which included a porcupine with a human face and tortoise shell surrounded by menacing lizards and serpents. His most known creature, the Nondescript, was carefully crafted from the hinderparts of a monkey to represent a human face.  Read more about the Nondescript +

Interestingly, Wanderings, Waterton’s spirited travel diary, with the Nondescript as a frontspiece was published just eight years after Mary Shelley’s notorious literary hallucination, Frankenstein. The process of taxidermy always borders on resurrection by breathing life into corpses and endowing them with a quasi-immortality. It is hard not to compare Waterton’s taxidermy Dr. Frankenstein’s own creative process. Both had a comprehensive knowledge of nature. Both attempted to usurp her generative powers in order to create new creatures and new life.