Mechanical Deer

Taxidermist & sculptor Lisa Black combines taxidermy with working gears and other mechanical contraptions including a wind-up baby crocodile.

Bird Legs at Bern

Bird legs on display at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Bern, Switzerland.  Image from Curious Expeditions.

mermaid.jpg

One of Takeshi Yamada's mermaids.  See more of his works here  +

Deyrolle Fire

The amazing Deyrolle taxidermy boutique [read about it here +] in the heart of Paris sadly suffered a major fire on February 1st, 2008.  The fire consumed most of the eccentric cabinet of curiosities on the first floor.  The insects and butterflies were the worse hit, and Deyrolle is currently seeking an entomology vendor to help replace the collection. Read all about the fire, the store's resurrection efforts, and all the posted letters of sympathy on Deyrolle's blogsite here in French or here in English. Even Gerard Depardieu is quoted: "there are no words - it's very violent."  

 

Popple

Katinka Simonese (aka Tinkebell) has created a reverible dog-cat thing.  Her work revolves around "consumptive attitude that (post)modern man has taken on in relation to pets," that is, the ways that the pet has been commodified into the perfect accessory to social life.  [read more +]

Monster Brains

Steve Plant's Ostrich

A ostrich skeleton in the home of Steve Plant self-described as "the Fanciful Amateur" and lover of taxidermy.  

Victor Brauner's Loup-Table

Victor Brauner's table with the head and tail of a fox made between 1939 and 1947 is in the tradition of 'objet surréaliste.'

Stuffed Pet Spaniel

A pet spaniel for sale at Top Hat Taxidermy, an online mail-order company specialising in Victorian taxidermy although with lots of new creatures for sale as well.  Check out all the pets: http://www.tophattaxidermy.com/pets.dhtm  

Gastorbass

The elusively gastorbass sighted in New Orleans.

The Fox and his Favourite Duck

A sweet image of a vintage fox with his friend the duck apparently purchased in the Castle District of Budapest.  The image is taken from http://www.curiousexpeditions.org/ a rather intriguing site "devoted to unearthing and documenting the wondrous, the macabre, and the obscure from around the globe." enjoy!

Passenger Pigeons

A row of passenger pigeons at the Field Museum in Chicago.  The buffalo of the sky, once flying in impossible flocks that blocked the sun itself, the American passenger pigeon was shot to extinction through the nineteenth century until only a few were left in the 1890s.  Martha, not pictured here, was the last survivor and died on September 1st, 1914 in the Cincinnatic Zoo. "No other bird," the naturalist John Muir wrote the year before, "had seemed to us so wonderful."  For more on the passenger pigeon's demise, Jennifer Price offers an excellent history in her Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America.

Untitled #133 (Moose) by Simen Johan

The moose, borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City were photographed by Simen Johan and added to a pastiche of Norway and Spain.  The work is part of Johan's series Until the Kingdom Comes and is currently (June 2007) being shown at MOCCA in Toronto.

Visit Simen Johan's webpage: http://www.simenjohan.com/

Justine Cooper's Trophies

For what must have been a year of extraordinary sights, Justin Cooper was the artist-in-residence at the Natural History Museum in New York. Captured with a vintage 4x5 camera, her beautiful photographs expose the eerie beauty of the museum's backrooms. According to her artist's statement,

“Accessing the stored collections was a fantastic journey into the physical spaces of a Natural History Museum where the imaginable and unimaginable reside side by side. But collections also function as a link between the past, present and future, representing passage from the 19th century institution to the 21th century one. The scientific usefulness of a collection may change, but its legacy remains, as does the potential for future relevance.”

Cooper's works are represented by Daneyal ManHood Gallery in New York.

http://daneyalmahmood.com/justinecooper_past_images.html?img=7

Thomas Grünfeld's Misfits

Thomas Grünfeld's anomalous creations are some of the strangest and most surreal of contemporary taxidermy. The creatures from his appropriately titled Misfit series are composed of bits and pieces of animals, all flawlessly sewn together to create entirely new species: a doberman pincher with a calf's head, a beast combining monkey and parrot, another creature, part mule, part giraffe, part ostrich.

Moving the Giraffe

The labours of moving a giraffe in mid-winter 1969 at the Free Museum in Nottingham, England.  The natural history collections contain some three-quarters of a million specimens in geology, botany and zoology including 6,000 birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, and of course a giraffe.  read more +

Laliberte's Fur Parlour

Laliberte's Fur Parlour in Quebec could have contained the largest collection of bear, weasel, and dog wicker basket holders ever produced.  I count 13.  Photograph from 1894. 

A Case of Hummingbirds

A case of hummingbirds in the London Natural History Museum believed to have belonged to William Bullock, a nineteenth-century naturalist and curator of the London Museum.  "There is not, it may safely be asserted, in all the varied works of nature in her zoological production," Bullock claimed of the family of Trochiladae or hummingbirds, "any family that can bear a comparison, for singularity of form, splendour of colour, or number and variety of species, with this the smallest of the feathered creation."  

Setting the Falcon

The frontispiece from the second edition of Montagu Browne's Practical Taxidermy: A Manual of Instruction to the Amateur in Collecting, Preserving, and Setting up Natural History Specimens of All Kinds published in 1889.   Once the bird was properly wired into position, unruly wing feathers sometimes "start up here and there, the wiring and binding must be supplemented by 'braces,' which are narrow strips of cardboard pinned in pairs at intervals below and above the wings, and held in position by pins running through both braces from the under to the upper surface." Browne offers the falcon as a visual explanation of the method: "a hawk properly 'set up' and 'bound' to represent it swooping on its prey."

Squirrel Suicide

The renegade Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan is known for his tragiocomedy.  His vision of a post-suicide squirrel strangely titled bidibidobidiboo (1996) is certainly no exception.  His other button-pushing taxidermic works include a donkey heaved up in the air by the weight of his cart and what appears to be a dead (or just exhausted) colt suspended from the ceiling. Cattelan's work is by no means limited to taxidermy.  In fact, he roams freely between sculptural media, whatever seems right for the purpose.  As Jeff Rian highlights, Cattelan is "an improviser of contexts, a manipulator of places and events, a Houdini-like escape artists ... at once a fool, entertainer, joker, magician, provocateur, and stuntman."

Image taken from the front cover of the October 1996 issue of Flash Art Internation; Rian quoted from the same issue.

Lion Heads

Lion heads photographed by the nineteenth-century hunter, explorer, and Staff Intelligence Officer Guy C. Dawnay in 1876. Dawnay’s love of hunting eventually proved fatal: Dawnay was killed by a wounded buffalo on a hunting expedition to east Africa in 1888.

Chuffy and the Time Machine

A clockwork transportation rodent from Amanda's Autopsies entitled "Chuffy and the Time Machine."  See more of her work at www.amandasautopsies.com

Elephant

Daniel Firman 's elephant Würsa stand still and upside down on her trunk. The pachyderm could only manage this delicate exercise at a distance of 18,000 km from the earth or if she were on a planet with a circumference of 2,484,0031.1 m (because of its weak gravitational pull). It is on the basis of learned scientific calculations that Daniel Firman reached these conclusions. The life size and hyper-realist sculpture borrows from the skills of a taxidermist named Jean-Pierre Gérard and puts into a new perspective the most basic physical laws of this world.