Get Stuffed

The background of Taxidermy is a combination of northern animal skin tanning and Egyptian mummification techniques.

Hanno the Navigator and the 'hirsute and savage people'.

As early as 2,200 BC, the Egyptians embalmed the bodies of dogs, cats, monkeys, hawks, etc as companions to the afterlife. Around 500 BC, the Carthaginians were reported to have preserved the skins of Gorillas killed by Hanno the Navigator. The skins were hung in the temple of Astarte, where they remained for several hundred years, until the conquest and destruction of Carthage in 146 BC by the Romans.
 

Early medieval European techniques of taxidermy were crude, and cobbled together from a combination of Egyptian mummification techniques, and animal skin tannery techniques. They stuffed the specimens with pungent herbs which masked the smell of decomposition, but this couldn't prevent decay and attack by insects. Consequently most of the specimens created in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries didn’t survive the ages.

 

This changed in the 1740s when a French ornithologist and son of an apothecary, began experimenting with an arsenic-based preservative. It  kept the insects away, but it wasn’t until more than 50 years later that a similar recipe (an arsenical soap), became generally available to taxidermists. So even the oldest collections today can't show specimens earlier than around 1800 AD.

However there are some exceptions .....

Crocodile In The Attic .... 'Here There Be Dragons'

The Italian town church of Ponte Nossa’s Santuario Madonna delle Lacrime Immacolate (Sanctuary of Our Lady of Immaculate Tears, alternatively known as Santa Maria Annunziata), has a stuffed animal dangling from the rafters .... a crocodile. Where it came from is now lost to the ages, however there are church documents detailing the crocodile’s removal from the church in 1534. So its at least nearly 500 years old and likely to be much older,  making it the oldest existing piece of taxidermy in the world. Its tough skin and incense fumes aided its survival, and strangely other Italian churches also have similar crocodile exhibits ... although not documented as being this old.

Whose A Pretty (old) Boy Then .....

There is an African Grey parrot on display in Westminster Abbey Museum in London which belonged to Frances Stuart, the Duchess of Richmond. She was a famous 'air head' beauty, who refused to become Charles II's mistress, and the model for Britannia on UK coins of the time until 1971 (and again on the 2006 Fifty pence coin). The bird is perched next to a life size wax effigy of the Duchess herself. She died in 1702, and requested that the bird be preserved after its death and placed next to her wax effigy. But then as the Count de Gramont remarked of her "it would be difficult to image less brain, combined with more beauty".

War Horse - Now War Trophy

The prize horse of the Swedish King Gustav Adolphus was shot from beneath him at Ingolstadt, Bavaria in 1632, during the course of the Thirty Years War. Captured by his enemies, it was skinned, mounted and exhibited as a war trophy by the Germans and is reputed to neigh whenever war is imminent (last heard in 1939 ... allegedly). It can still be seen in the Ingolstadt Museum.

Waterton’s Nondescript

Charles Waterton, author of 'Waterton’s Wanderings in South America', which was one of the most successful travel books of the nineteenth century also performed taxidermy and developed his own method of preserving skins with mercuric chloride. He was rather eccentric and used his taxidermy in jokes. Returning from Guiana (Guyana) in 1824, he claimed to have discovered a new species that resembled a man, which he named the "Nondescript", which he had shot and stuffed.  It is now believed that his "Nondescript" was actually moulded out of the hindquarters of a howler monkey. It is still owned by Wakefield Town Council.

Of course, these advances in taxidermy techniques don't remove the need for a good taxidermist ....

Surprised Leopard

or good taste ...

Moleskin Slippers With Real Mole .... Really!