“Time spent at the American Museum of Natural History is always time well spent. The dioramas alone could keep a person busy looking and admiring for a lifetime.
Less well-known but just as rewarding is the museum’s film collection, which contains glimpses into some of the most beautiful corners that the world has to offer — both natural and human endeavor. (There are also quite a few peculiarities, such as the film of mime interpretations of Piltdown Man and other anthropological hoaxes.)
Modern Taxidermy: Mounting the Indian Elephant (shown here in abridged form) is a 1927 silent film that documents Carl Akeley’s taxidermy process from the raw hide — fresh from the Faunthorpe-Vernay collection expedition — to finished display.”
Read more at NPR (Thanks Dan)
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I love taxidermy, but honestly, when you look at it like this it does seem like a somewhat silly pursuit. Kill elephant, take elephant out of elephant skin, reconstruct elephant out of clay and put skin onto it, remove clay elephant again, and eventually you have a skin that looks like an elephant. If you’d just, y’know, not killed the elephant in the first place…
(Yes, I know that the taxidermy will keep beyond the natural expiry date of the elephant. Still, the concept has a silly quality.)
cool, taxidermy…. imagine having 2 stuff a whole ELEPHANT!!!!
tht is wat taxidermy is basicly? the elephant seems 2 be made different, probably coz of the HUGENESS!
i wanna play with this stuff!
Mummy ?
Are you my mummy ?