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About 10 years ago I was working for a gaming company doing creature design. After work, I would go home and dissect animals in my garage. I borrowed a tiger carcass from a local taxidermist. I wanted to understand how the jaw muscles worked, so I stop motion animated it.

The muscle on the back of the head (Temporalis) bulges out when the jaw is closed. But when the is jaw is open, it depresses in like the surface of a trampoline. But not uniformly, in a Y shaped pattern.

I ended up getting evicted for stop motion animating tiger parts in my garage…..but it was worth it. I still have hard drives full of animal carcasses reference animations today. Fun Times.

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Golden jackal skulls, Bulgaria

Personal collection

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Animal Preservation

Here’s a post to preserving animals in as many forms as I can shove in here/am aware about. Please feel free to reblog and add more links!

Taxidermy

Mountable vs Non-mountable Pelts (visual guide)

Mountable Pelt (visual)

How to Reshape a Face on a Pelt

Making a Soft Mount Coyote

Mounting a Persian Leopard (gore tw)

Salt and Alum Tanning Rabbit Hides

Finger Fleshing Rabbit Hides

Tru Bond Tanning

Egg Tanning

Fleshing a Coyote (video)

Taxidermy Quality Pelt

Collecting

Bone Collecting for Beginners

Bone Collecting in Scotland

Roadkill Collector’s Arsenal

Using Hydrogen Peroxide to Whiten Bones

Whitening Tutorial

Why to not Boil or Bleach Bones

Degreasing Tutorial

Processing and Cleaning Bones

Feather Identification

Decomposing in Pots

Choosing the Right Method for Cleaning

Cleaning With Maceration

An American Vultures Guide to (legally!) Working Around the MBTA

Studying Owl Pellets

How to Clean Feathers

How to Blow Out Eggs

Preservation

Forum Thread on Rat Preservation

Preserving Animals

Alcohol Preservation

Preserve Moss

Preserve Bird Nests

Dry Flowers

Salt/Borax Drying

Preserve a Wasp Nest

Insects

Relaxing Jar Tutorial

Basic Insect Pinning Tutorial

Insect Relaxing

Insect Pinning

Carving

Bone Carving Tools

Working With Horn

Legal Issues

United States Animal Parts Laws

Legal Birds to Collect From (US)

Migratory Birds Protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act

Wild Bird Laws (Scotland)

Birds Protected in Canada

Schedules (UK)

US Cat & Dog Fur

International Shipping

Taxidermy Regulations

Misc

Vulture Culture shirt by NaturePunk

Book Suggestions

Vultures Around the World

Fur Sewing

Another Masterpost by Pastoriagym

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SKINNING TUTORIAL

Alright, so since I’ve been recieving a ton of questions on how I skin animals for their fur and skeletons, I just thought I’d make a step by step picture tutorial. Everything is under the cut, due to the length of it, and for gore as well.

-WARNING- Graphic images under the cut! Do not look if you aren’t okay with seeing the skinning process!

First of all, I do not claim to be an expert, nor do I think that my way is always the right way. This is just an explanation for how I do things, and to maybe give others some ideas. As the saying goes, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”, and that is very true. I have seen other methods that work just as well, so keep that in mind!

1) First, lay the animal on its back (I have a squirrel here) and spread the fur where you plan on cutting. I like to start right on the sternum so that I have something to push against.

2) Make the cut. It should be deep enough to see the muscle, but not so deep that the muscle has been cut into.

3) Here is a closer look at the incision. Widen the incision by pulling up on the skin and cutting through the membranes holding it to the muscle (look at next step for more detail)

4) Okay this one is important! So when you’re cutting the skin away from the muscle, if you pull at the skin you should be able to see a very thin membrane (that’s what the arrow is pointing to). When you cut, you want to cut through this membrane. It works best to make a lot of quick, short slicing motions along where the red dotted line is in the above picture. This cuts the membrane without letting any meat get stuck to the skin (I really hope that makes sense, it is so hard to explain this without using my hands!

5) After you’ve made the initial incision all the way up to the base of the neck, you make an incision up the forearm (along the dotted line)

6) Cut the skin away from the foreleg until it is only connected at the wrist. Now, at this point, if you were skinning for taxidermy, or for a pelt with claws, you would need to do a lot of fine cutting to get those pesky little toe bones out (If you want good tips on skinning for taxidermy, some blogs that would be helpful include naturepunk, coyotequeen, and afterlifeanatomy). I however, am skinning this squirrel purely for the bones, so once I’ve gotten this far I just pull hard on the fur (up, towards the paw, away from the body) until the fur rips right off the paw…

7) …like so! Done with the first leg! Now, just do the exact same with the other foreleg.

8) Once you’ve finished both forelegs, cut up to the chin, along the dotted line, widening as you go.

9) Here’s what it should look like once you’ve split the chin, all the way up. Also, as you cut up to the chin, be widening your cut by cutting the membrane around the neck.

10) Here is the ear bud, which you’ll need to cut through. Cut it as close to the head as possible…

…like so!

11) the next obstacle you’ll hit as you skin around the head is the eye. Pull the skin away from the head as best you can and carefully cut through the membranes connecting the eyelids to the head…

…and it should end up looking like this. Now just repeat for the other side of the head, and skin down the forehead until you hit the nose cartilage, and then cut cut through that. It’s pretty straightforward, it’ll probably make a lot more sense when you’re actually going through the process yourself.

12) Here is what the face skin should look like when you’ve finished the head. The two holes circled in blue are the eye holes, and green ones are the ear holes. (Also, you can see the tiny bullet someone shot this poor guy with on the left hand side of the picture, I found it lodged in his neck! His skull was broken in a few places, which caused the internal bleeding you can see on head)

13) And now to the back legs. Very similar to the front legs, however it can be a little difficult getting around the hock, especially on larger animals. But basically follow the dotted line, and then pull off the paw skin just like before…

…and you’ll have something that looks like this

14) Before moving onto the next leg, lets talk genitalia. With females this isn’t much of an issue, but with males you can do it several ways. You can either avoid the penis and testicles entirely (cutting around them and leaving a big mass of fuzz on the carcass) or skin them. I decided to skin them on this particular male, but honestly it’s purely up to you, and what you plan on doing with the fur or carcass. If you do plan on skinning them, just take your time and be careful not to cut through any of the flesh, it can be a bit more difficult to navigate the nether regions than other parts of the body, however the basic concept is still the same.

15) Alright, once you have finished both rear legs, it should look something like this. All that’s left is the tail, which can be tricky. There are multiple ways of skinning tails, and I usually do it by just pushing back the fur and cutting a straight incision straight down the underside of the tail, much like how you cut the initial incision on the chest. Then I grab the fur part of the tail (by the skin, not just the hairs! If you grab just the hairs you could end up ripping them out) and gently pull it away fromt he meat of the tail bit by bit, making the occasional cut at membranes to help it along.

16) Here is a closer look at pulling the skin away from the tail. In animals as small as this it is very easy to rip the tail skin, so go slow! Once you’ve gotten down a ways, you can pull the tail right out from the skin without cutting all the way to the tip (it gets so small that splitting it down that far would be nearly impossible, and unnecessary). Some people pull the entire tail out without splitting it at all, but I find it easier to split it at least half way, or all the way on larger animals, especially if I plan on tanning the fur afterwards.

17) Congratulations, you’re done! If you want to tan the fur, at this point you would flesh the hide and then salt it, but I will not go into those details on this tutorial. I sincerely hope this is of some use, if I need to add anything, or if you have any other questions, feel free to ask!

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Welsh pony skull.

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Little guy just mounted. Laws regulating the possession of bear cubs vary greatly, even within states. Because of the large and healthy bear population in the Adirondacks it is legal to possess them. This guy was tagged and collected as roadkill.

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Day 8: Favorite non-skull bone

Vertebrae! Specifically the atlas :’) I love how much they vary in shape, they are such interesting bones.

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I showed someone a photo of my room, and their response was “I thought this was a photo of a haunted house attraction at first”

I think. This is a success.

(This was the photo)

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Could you make a post on the Eurasian Jay and Eurasian Magpie? They're my two favourite corvids 😊

Why yes, here are some nice high quality Corvids for you...

Eurasian Jay (Garrulus glandarius), HIM EAT A TASTY SEED!!!, family Corvidae, order Passeriformes, Purley, UK

photographs by Edwin ‘Bebedi’ Godinho 

Eurasian Magpie or Common Magpie (Pica pica), family Corvidae, order Passeriformes, Helsinki, Finland

photograph by Teemu Lehtinen

Eurasian Magpie or Common Magpie (Pica pica), family Corvidae, order Passeriformes, India

photograph by Sandeep Chakraborty

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Skull of a female roe deer with a very large tumor (x)

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sold

it turned out so beautifully 🥹

and the plum blossoms show which way the lid fits 🌸

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would you rather be taxidermied or be a wet specimen wait dont leave

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Cougar (Puma concolor) with a teratoma that formed teeth [x]

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two skulls i just finished cleaning!! fisher and bobcat :)

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Coyote (Canis latrans) skull added thanks to collaborator thevulturedog!

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