Stuffed Stuff

The Opposite of Taxidermy?

A couple of years ago I visited California, and, given that at the time I’d been working in science centres & museums for eight years, I had to make the pilgrimage to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I wasn’t disappointed - a whole hall of amazing, simple, beautiful and mind-bending exhibits.

The one I’ve shown here is such a great idea. Get some animal corpses, stick them in a tank with some maggots and see what happens. I loved it! You get to learn about anatomy, decomposition and life processes, and be grossed out all in one go. Genius!

Looking back a the pictures, I wonder if this is the opposite of taxidermy. The animals are still dead, but the display is honest about death and the process of decomposition, rather than attempting to create an illusion of life. And it’s all about living processes rather than static, man-made products. Of course, I’m not at all suggsting that natural history galleries swap all their taxidermy for rotting corpses, but it’s sort of an intriguing thought.

And once the maggots have done their work (as is the case in the picture above), the skeletons, gently collapsed as they might be in the desert, and still with little patches of fur and feather, are actually strangely beautiful.