#zoology museum

[finchwingart]

I took my little london drawing club to the zoology museum on saturday and the turnout was so great 🥺 also did a lil sketchbook swap afterwards

[robbie-roo]

part two to my taxidermy adventures!

once again I will be showing images of dead animals in this post it is only the pelt but it is still a dead animal so here is your official warning

unfortunately I don't have an ending to my taxidermy adventure as my semester came to a close before I could make any more progress :( I will be reaching out to my professor to see if I can work on some future projects next semester though!

anyways! so we have a fully flayed squirrel now not to brag but I did amazing on the face and didn't cause any tears while skinning

(photos under read more)

so sort of behind my squirrel you can see the mount we will be using for this little lady this is made out of really thick styrophome like material and just so happened to fit almost perfectly! you'll notice there is no tail- that's something we will fix later on (I never got the chance on this mount :( )

brief pause to admire my little clay sculpture I made while kneading clay for the eyes teehee

but yes the next step is to find some eyeballs! you must measure the eye on the carcus to make sure you get something that will fit your pelt you do this by measuring the entire thing and taking the diameter then you find some glass or plastic eyes that are as close to that measurement as possible but keep in mind that skin is stretchy so something that is slightly too big could still fit pretty nicely

once you find an eye you have to stick it to the mount using clay and sometimes a little glue (we just used clay) you have to make a little hole and score the area to make sure things stick and then you can fit the head over it to make sure it fits

notice while I have her inside out you can see the inside of the ear and the eyelid are still attached to the skin once she is flipped the right way you can see why that was so important!

now it's time to fit the mount in- out mount had space for the feet to be empty so first we have to cut those off

so how to you get the skin on with a cut down the stomach? well you cant... it would be a lot easier to do with a cur down the spine but that can make sewing a little hard so how do we do it?

cut the mount up and glue it later of course!

so we cut up the mount and rough up the outside so the skin is more likely to stick

and here's our rough first fitting!

now it's time to adjust and reconnect all the pieces like a puzzle

unfortunately this is where I ended :( this was the week right before finals for me so I had to get home and study and unfortunately never found a time to finish up before the semester ended

but I can describe the next steps!

so now we have the mount in but we have a really floppy tail and that just won't work we want this little lady looking as alive as possible so to do this we get a piece of wire that slides all the way up the empty tail and we stick it right into the mount then it's time to glue!

I'm making this all sound a lot easier than it is this is a super tedious process and figuring out how the cut up sections fit together is honestly really difficult but once everything slots together all that's left to do is sew

we sew up our cut on the stomach and we sew those lips closed sometimes we find places we want to make look a little fuller such as the cheeks or around the stomach so we will pad these sections with cotton before we are too late

now all that's left is brushing out the fur and making her look a little more fluffy and letting her dry!

and that's it! I'm hoping I'll get to either finish her or work on something similar next semester but I hope this was interesting even without a finished product :)

[markscherz]

A rare third-person perspective of me at work in my office, courtesy of my father, who visited and helped out today.

[dead-dogs-still-fetch]

A Trip to the Field Museum

Some past photos from my previous trip to the Field Museum last year during a free day. The museum has an amazing collection of specimens and fun temporary exhibits. The one they were hosting when we visited was the Blood Suckers exhibit.

The museum offers free admission days serval times a month for residents or students in Illinois.

[in-the-horniman]

We have all been very busy in the store preparing for the redisplay our Natural History Gallery.

Here’s a lovely Flying Fox we needed to measure!

Flying Foxes are a type of megabat and can have a wingspan of up to 1.5metres! They are mainly vegetarian but can also eat insects.

Bats are so often thought of as scary, but we think he has the cutest face!

Object number NH.A3832

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

Fish fact #641

Megamouth shark!

It is the smallest of the extant filter-feeding sharks, but it's not exactly small, either: it can reach a length of 5 and a half meters (18 feet). The species is still very mysterious to science, as there has only been about 273 sightings as of September of 2022, according to the Florida Museum.

[arthistoryanimalia]

#HedgehogWeek 🦔:

All hedgehogs are capable of volvation aka conglobation - aka, they can roll up into an armored ball in defense. 🙂

Hedghog Egypt, New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, c. 1550–1450 BCE Faience, diameter 5.8cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544054

Photo via Stocksy United on Pinterest

[kattheerat]

Quick study!

I visited the Museum of Osteology on the weekend after my 21st birthday. So far i’ve doodled only 6 out of the One Million Billion photos i took, but i hope to do more

i’ve gotten pictures of plenty of non-mammals that i hope to study as well

[belovedapollo]

from when I went and visited the Zoological Museum in Hamburg 🪲 reblog is ok, don’t repost/use

[fox-teeth]

Risograph print: Things in the Museum

Drawn at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, printed in fluorescent pink and seafoam inks by Outlet in PDX as part of their wonderful Virtual Riso Basics workshop!

[clair-blake]

I am in love with a dead thing.

Trinity College Zoology museum, Dublin, 2023

[leaf-thief]

some prehistoric animal models from the kinda hidden Paleontology and Historical Geology Museum of Sofia University!

sad to see they're kinda busted :(

[markscherz]

The specimens in your video, are they killed to be preserved or do they die of natural causes before preservation?

As with all natural history collections, the vast majority of specimens in the Natural History Museum of Denmark (where I am the Curator of Herpetology) were euthanised to be preserved and kept in these libraries of biological knowledge, where they are curated and maintained for research purposes for centuries to come. We have one of the oldest collections in the world; some of our specimens are over 300 years old.

With amphibians in particular, we almost never find them dead in the wild, unless they've been run over by vehicles or have died of some disease in large masses, because their soft bodies decay extremely quickly. Even in captivity, a vertebrate that dies of 'natural' causes usually is almost always in a pretty grim condition either leading up to the death, or by the time it is found. These make for very bad specimens. With reptiles, you can do a little better, but not much. So, even though we have lots of animals from Copenhagen Zoo that died in captivity and put in the freezer soon afterwards, these are mostly in poor condition. Also, because they are not representative of wild animals (dietary and environmental differences), and lack information on their locality of origin, they are poor animals for research purposes, and mostly are avoided by researchers wanting to study e.g. natural variation in a species. However, they are still very valuable specimens, especially when they are the only specimens of a species that we have.

[dead-dogs-still-fetch]

Birds of The Harvard Museum of Natural History

Felt a separate post for the birds was warranted, the collection is huge. Everything from birds of prey, waterfowl, hummingbirds, and even a few extinct species.

Some of the parrots were looking a tad rough but you try to keep a corpse looking good for over a few decades.

[ilovemuseums]

A case of skulls focusing on dentition

At the Museum of science and nature in Bordeaux

[corpsebod]

Pic dump from my favourite museum!!!