Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Taxidermy

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why taxidermy is secretly incredibly fascinating. Special guests: Christian & Ellen Weatherford.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.Hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Hear Alex's new "explainer podcast" about all things MaxFun: https://youtu.be/6kNplapKs-w (It's uploaded to YouTube because he filmed his face while he taped it.)

Taxidermy. Known for being stuffed. Famous for being mounted. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why taxidermy is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of Podcasts All About Why Being Alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm very much not alone this week. Of course, I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, hi. Hey, that's me. Yeah.

And hello, everyone. Thank you so much for participating in the Maximum Fun Drive. It technically ended, I think, about 70 minutes after I posted this, but it's always a good time to support Maximum Fun, and we're so glad to be joined by two of our buddies from our new network. From the show, Just the Zoo of Us, from many other things as well, please welcome Christian Weatherford and Ellen Weatherford. Hey, guys. How you doing? Hi.

Hello. I'm so excited. I'm excited to talk to you again. This is not my first time talking to either of you. So I'm back, baby. This time I brought a friend. It's me. Alex, I'm sorry that now you're outnumbered by animal podcasters. We've slowly taken over and we've turned this into an animal podcast.

It's great to be. If I bring up humans, gang up on me. Be like, no like no no stop it i'm personally just glad it's not taxonomy because yeah yeah i don't feel like getting into those weeds only if you want to hear me struggle with latin i i hate it i hate it so much all my homies hate taxonomy is it is it because taxonomy is like antique and European? Is that the issue? I don't know. It's just confusing and they're always

like sort of reshifting it around. Like we thought this fish was related to this fish, but actually it's related to that fish. And it's also, I don't know. It's a mess. It's annoying. There should be merch or shirts or something of like taxonomy stinks that's the whole

and then you just wear it to middle school or high school biology and and mess with the teacher that'll show them yeah yeah they'll love that for sure you definitely won't get a dress code violation for that i realized as i said that i'm basically encouraging antagonizing teachers, and that's probably not the best stance to take. It's not really what I'm into. I have a good taxonomy, anti-taxonomy shirt. It'd be taxonomy. What kind of genus came up with that? Wow.

Oof. I took immeasurable psychic damage from that sentence. The pain means the joke is working. But we're not talking about taxonomy today, thank goodness. We're talking about something else, right, Alex? Yes, and thank you very much to Lister and supporter Caroline Gaston and other folks as well. But she really cheer-led this and also does taxidermy at home because the topic is taxidermy. And let's start with Christian and Ellen, because I also checked with y'all before

I set this as the topic of the episode, because I don't know how all animal people feel about it. But what is your relationship to the topic or opinion of the topic of taxidermy? Well, you know, I have always felt largely neutral towards taxonomy in the sense that it's not something that bothers me. Taxidermy. Sorry, we keyed up taxonomy. Wow. I had it stuck in my head. Sorry. Taxidermy. I've always felt kind of like neutral about it. It's not something that like bothers me. I know that, you know, a lot of people that have a strong soft spot for animals can sometimes be a little disturbed or unsettled by seeing, you know, a dead animal body or parts that have been posed to mimic a lifelike animal. I know that can be unsettling for a lot of people,

but it's never really bothered me, maybe because it seems like it's just around so often that it doesn't seem particularly unusual. And then just last week, we had an opportunity to see some really incredible taxonomy. Taxidermy. Wow. I'm going to struggle so bad. We saw some incredible taxidermy that was used for research purposes in a great museum that we saw. So I was big, a big proponent of that taxidermy. That was great.

But we've also seen the other end of that spectrum. Yeah. With very poor quality taxidermy being hung up in like a seafood restaurant or something. I was going to bring up fish camps because we live in florida where there are lots and lots of fish camps and fish camps will usually be decorated with all sorts of taxidermy uh there's one in particular what was the one we went to but this place was just like wall to wall like every possible animal you could imagine was just like stuffed and and posed and hung on the walls or they had like pronghorns and elk and all sorts of wild stuff i figured it would

just be a big marlin like i've seen in in pop culture wow it's every day for sure had that he for sure had that and more and more had that. And more. And more. All this and more. Yeah. Nothing that perks up my appetite more like an animal mausoleum. I don't know if maybe they're trying to give you a preview of like, this is what you can expect from it. But like, also taxidermy does not...

This is what you're eating. Look into its glass eyes. It doesn't evoke freshness. You know what I mean? Like it's so like stiff and preserved that like it doesn't evoke appetizing. It's not it's not giving. That's what I want for lunch. With the museum kind.

Thank you all for sending pictures of what you saw do you want to name the museum that it was at yeah um i have to admit i don't for sure know how it's pronounced but i think it's beady biodiversity museum it's b-e-a-t-y maybe beady um biodiversity museum and that is at the university of british columbia up in in Vancouver, where we were visiting just last week. And my friend Sophia Osborne, who is actually one of the hosts of the podcast Beyond Blathers, goes to UBC and suggested that we check out this museum because it has an actual real mounted blue whale skeleton. So we got to see the blue whale skeleton. But they also, this is like a research museum. So rather than being set up into like exhibits and like, you know,

what do you call them, dioramas and stuff like that, it was set up like library shelves and cabinets. And you would just kind of walk down the rows of the shelves and look at the specimens that were like either mounted taxidermy or like in jars or all sorts of stuff like that they use for like research um it was really cool i was really glad we got to see those i can smell the old formaldehyde now. Yeah, look at Adam. Yeah. I didn't notice any smell. Did you notice a smell?

No, not in the museum. No, they did a really good job managing the smell, which we also watched a documentary on the logistics and preparation of the blue whale skeleton. Oh, yeah. And evidently the smell from the whale oil that was like soaked into the bones was a major hurdle getting these whale bones into this museum because it took them months to get to like degrease the bones until it wouldn't smell anymore uh hilarious absolutely hilarious and i'm so glad they did that because it didn't smell yep my technique dish soap i wonder if they tried that that's right through that whale grease when katie's at her really really big sink that's what she uses

when she's working on those whale specimens yeah at the super sink to give you an idea they almost they almost had to cut open the doors of the museum to get the bones inside so that's like how much dish soap you'd need. And those are the individual bones. So it's not like they were trying to move a fully constructed skeleton. This was just getting the skull through. Yeah, getting the skull through the door. They were worried that they weren't going to be able to fit it through

the entire front doors of the museum. And they were worried they were going to have to cut the frame of it open. They should have just smashed a whale skeleton-shaped hole in the kool-aid man but it's a whale oh no i'm dead it was a really cool experience that was definitely the best taxidermy i've ever seen i've seen like christian mentioned we've seen some stinkers. We've seen some real fails. I've also been tricked by taxidermy in that I thought jackalopes were real until I was like a teenager. Because of like, you know, people will do like, you know, jackalope mounts and stuff like that. And I totally bought it. I totally thought they were real.

I mean, rabbit with herpes versus rabbit with antlers, you know, same difference. It's not that big of a stretch. It seems so normal and real. If you've ever seen, I mean, there are rabbits who get herpes, who get these like wart-like growths on their faces and heads. And sometimes it can look a great deal like antlers. And there's some speculation that could be the origin of the jackalope myth, but it could also just be a coincidence. Gross. Yeah.

That's nasty. I feel like this is going to be a nasty, heavy episode. Yeah, it's an interesting topic for a podcast, especially because so much of it can be visual. So like if folks out there are fans of the bad taxidermy blogs where they have pictures of like a weird lion with its tongue hanging out and stuff, we're not really going to cover that because it's so, it's just, you should just go look at it. But this will be a lot of like the origins and history of it because I think I have two different extended family members who like to joke to me about jackalopes as a kid. And I would be like, I don't have much context for where this joke is coming from, but sure.

That's the thing. I've mostly lived in the southeast for almost my entire life. I would have no reason to have ever come across any sort of jackalope lore or anything. So I think I just saw a mount of one one time and just like added it to my mental catalog of animals that exist. And I was like, yeah, that's probably one of them. Yeah, because my other main taxidermy experiences are museums where they were trying to, in that late 1800s way, be very scientific. Like I'd go to the Field Museum in Chicago and they'd be like, behold, this taxidermied gorilla. And I'd be like, there's something up with this, I feel like,

but also it is a specimen. I can see it for sure. Like, if I didn't have actual zoos nearby, this is a good way to see a gorilla. That's true. A very low-maintenance gorilla. All you got to do is stick some servo motors in there and, hey, you got a moving, realistic gorilla.

Oh, I love Disney World. there and hey you got a moving realistic gorilla oh i love disney world these animatronics are getting wild what and from here i think we can get into that stuff about especially the history of taxidermy but also what's going on with it today on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... Who is the host that's a fact machine with all the stats? Alex! You're damn right. Who is co-host who shares numbers with the listeners?

Katie! Can you dig it? Yeah, and folks, that was submitted by Nick Name on the Discord. Listeners. Kitty. Can you dig it? Yeah. And folks, that was submitted by Nick Name on the Discord. Thank you. And we have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to SifPod at gmail.com.

That was great. I feel like I got to witness such a moment there. That was pivotal. Thank you. We are cool and from the 1970s. That's what I think about us. We have some pipes. And first number this week is almost 500 years old.

Because almost 500 years old, that is the minimum age of the world's oldest extant piece of taxidermy that we know of. Like taxidermy that has been held, like taxidermy that has been held together, put together all of that time. OK, so you mean like the the piece that we still have? That's not necessarily to say that like that's when taxidermy for sure began. That's right. Yeah. It makes sense because you'd expect them to kind of break down over time because it is

still like soft tissue and organic matter. Like it's going to it like it's gonna it's it's not gonna hold up forever yeah i mean it's like it's leather and fur and there are insects and stuff that do like to eat that um or you know people over time picking at it like jerky you don't know what happens with those things. You put it in the wash on the wrong setting, but yeah, they wear and tear over time. Yeah, they're not invincible. And this one, I think it speaks to what lasts and doesn't,

because it turns out the oldest known piece of taxidermy we still have is a crocodile. And so that's a relatively tough animal. Yeah, full of osteoderms and stuff like that that's gonna stick around it's not exactly full of like hair and stuff that'll fall out unless this one had like a full head of hair and we just won't ever know it's the one the one the one crocodile that just has luscious locks and we'll never know. What if they always did, but like that stuff never fossilized?

So like we just never found fossils of it. So we just don't know that crocodiles used to have like lion manes. Yeah, it's like the elephant ear. Yeah. What if they had throat sacks? Who knows? And this crocodile, it's in a church in northern Italy. It's in a town called Ponte Nasa in Lombardy.

And I looked it up. That's very far from Katie's location. That would be a long train ride. It's three hours away. I'm going to go. I want to see this crocodile. Nice. Go see the old crocodile.

Atlas Obscura has pictures of this if you go to the town church of ponte nasa in lombardi it's called sanctuary of our lady of immaculate tears they have a centuries-old taxidermied crocodile hanging from the ceiling and there's a few mysteries around it we don't know the exact age we just know that there are church records of them moving the crocodile in january of 1534 and 1534 nearly 500 years ago so it's at least that old oh so the taxidermy itself is probably older than yeah like probably and apparently it was in the church attic for more than a century and then somebody found it again in the 1700s hung it back up but there's it's just like hanging from the ceiling yeah it's just like suspended like an acrobat or something

yeah hmm can you imagine you're like oh gosh i really need to get around to cleaning out that old attic let me just look through here see what's's back here. Oh, my God. I'd be delighted. It's a crocodile. Free crocodile. This is going up immediately. It's like when you're going through the garage and you're like, oh, my God, I forgot I had this poster. We need to put this up. Yeah, especially some beautiful old Italian church.

It's like finally something to distract from the boring, amazing paintings on the ceiling. Finally. It was so incredible. Was it something they put up to get like kids interested in coming to church? Yeah. Like come check out our crocodile and also pray. It'd work on me. Wine, crackers and a crocodile. It'd work on me. Wine,

crackers, and a crocodile? Now you're talking. The only improvement I could think of is if they had some sort of setup where it could swing. Maybe it wasn't out all the time, but sometimes in the middle of the service, boom, just like they deploy it

suddenly. Attach it to a wall fan and have it go around and around. I would come every single week. I would never skip. I would never miss a service. Put a cape on it, call it Super Croc. Yeah. There he goes.

That would convert me. We're kidding, but I got to wonder if that somehow was what they were going for, because this all leads into an immediate takeaway for the show. Takeaway number one. A lot of the world's oldest taxidermy is specifically crocodiles in European churches and government buildings. What's the relationship? What's happening here? Religious connotation to the crocodiles? Atlas Obscura has a lot on this.

They say that there's probably two good theories as to why this keeps popping up, because there's another croc in the village of Grazia near Mantua in Lombardy. There's a Czech town hall in the city of Brno that has one. But one theory is that crocodiles reminded people of the dragon in the legend of St. George. There's a saint who famously fought and killed a dragon. He's the patron saint of England for that reason. And so, like, people might have thought, hey, this is a taxidermy representation of a dragon, or they might have just mistaken it for a dragon straight up. So that could be part of why. Like, that is a actual religious connection, maybe.

I can see that. Also, like, because so much of the, like, stories from the Bible, you know, take place in areas that do have crocodiles. Like, I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure crocodiles are in, like, some of those. I think, like, Egypt, right? So then, you know, there's a flight from Egypt and the pharaoh is involved in the Old Testament and stuff. You know, it would make sense. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask, do they know where these crocodiles were from like perhaps the nile or somewhere else because yeah that's a great

question there's not there's no record and also i i find this less believable atlas obscura wonders if maybe crocodiles had a bigger range centuries ago and kind of worked their way into southern europe so that could be another reason they were available and handy. I was going to say, there's one thing that British people like doing. It's stealing stuff from Egypt. So I would imagine they probably jacked some of those. I will take one of your finest crocodiles,

please. Just someone with a very long coat and a very crocodile like protrusion. Like, no, no, no. It's fine. I am simply pregnant and then the the other compelling theory is that european churches might have had

all sorts of taxidermied animals in there and just crocodiles are what has lasted like the other stuff wasn't maintained properly and got weird and moldy and they took it down can you imagine just like feeling something drop on your head and it's like a chunk of fur from an ancient taxidermied weasel it's a it's an immersive uh noah's Ark cosplay experience. Yeah. They're like, this is what it felt like on the boat. Okay, so I also went to a Presbyterian church, and it was one of those old carpenter gothic Presbyterian

churches that's built like an old wooden ship, but upside down. Have you seen those churches? Oh, I kind of went to one, yeah. So our church was built, they basically just built a ship and then flipped it over. And that was what the church was. So I'm imagining that, but like filled with taxidermied animals.

And it definitely is giving Noah's Ark. I'm getting that vibe a lot from that. They could be like, this is what it felt like. Yeah. I kind of buy it. They'd have to have the animals upside down to really, you know, get that feeling. Yeah, like this is just a oddly frequent, basically, diorama in especially far northern Italian churches. And then also a city in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, like a lot of the taxidermy we still have is crocodiles.

And I do think it's partly because they are such a leathery material to start with. It was relatively easy to preserve once you once you did the maybe harder step of catching a crocodile. I mean, I feel like you just sit on them, right? That's what I always see. You just sit on the crocodile and it's done. You can hold their mouth closed. They're not very good at opening their mouth you can hold their mouth closed it's the spinning part yeah the spinning part will get you won't it i'm i'm hoping that like my of course the part of my brain that wants to like

see the kindness and goodness and everybody hopes that they just came across a crocodile that just happened to already have died peacefully and painlessly in its sleep. And we're like, ah, I shall preserve its body in dignity forever. That definitely sounds like old Europeans. Yeah, they for sure were all about doing things peacefully and with dignity. From what I can find about modern taxidermy, it's very driven by that practice. And I think they super did the opposite back in the past. Like, nope. Like, how fast can I hunt this?

Because I want it in its prime for the taxidermy was kind of the thing. Yeah, because I feel like a lot of times it implies that it is like a hunting trophy of sorts, right? I mean, depending on how old those are, those could be pretty impressive, depending on the tools they had. That's true, yeah. Right? You'd have your, imagine having like your high score in a video game hung from the walls

of a church for 500 years. score in a video game hung from the walls of a church for 500 years. And this one is not hunting. The next number is the year 1702. Because 1702, that is the year of the death of a woman named Frances Stewart and also the death of her parrot. And her African gray parrot, her pet parrot, is believed to be the oldest taxidermied bird that we still have. Wow.

So did they die in the same year? Yeah. Apparently they were close companions for nearly 40 years. And I don't totally trust Westminster Abbey, but they are the source. And they say that the parrot died shortly after the lady did. Like it was, you know implied emotional connection and then it died right died of a broken heart i would believe that big like i've from what i've heard about how closely parrots bond with members of their flock whether they

are bird or human uh and also how notoriously difficult they are to properly care for i would imagine like i totally believe that like the death of an owner would also be closely followed by the death of a parrot i just wonder if she left the parrot to her like nephew jimmy and jimmy kept trying to feed the parrot like things parents do not eat like here's another cracker and just killed the parrot with bad food. Pizza rolls? Pizza rolls. Yeah, you want another pizza on a biscuit? Those famous 1702 pizza rolls.

I do. I like the idea that because only the wealthy traveled, like, only the nobility had pizza rolls. Like, I have been to Italia and I have discovered this. At their bougie high society parties, they like would serve pizza rolls on a little intricate silver platter. Because this person was very, very wealthy. They were titled Duchess of Richmond, Frances Teresa Stewart.

She was a maid of honor to the queen, who was the wife of King Charles II. She was a maid of honor to the queen, who was the wife of King Charles II. This story also speaks to how differently we treat humans and animals in this situation. Because before Frances Stewart's death, she commissioned a life-size wax effigy of herself and arranged to have that dressed in her clothes and jewelry and presented in Westminster Abbey. But then she also arranged for her parrot to be taxidermied. And they kept the entire skeleton intact as a framework and preserved it in Westminster Abbey. But then she also arranged for her parrot to be taxidermied. And they kept the entire skeleton intact as a framework and preserved it in a case. And so it's more than 300 years old and still with us because it was a really rich person who was like into preserving everything. She was like, I'm going to preserve me and wax, the bird and taxidermy, we're doing it. Taxidermy for thee and not for me.

Coward. Taxidermy we're doing it taxidermy for thee and not for me coward taxidermy yourself yeah i'm looking at this taxidermy parrot's expression and it is a little skeptical it's like not he doesn't look totally on board with this he doesn't look horrified but he's like wait you're gonna what now and then that's where they captured it yeah and it's just so weird that basically every story and this is going to be available as a picture because it's taxidermy it's meant to be seen it's meant to be presented yeah it's meant to be smelled it's meant to be touched it felt right christian just pulled up a picture on his phone and showed it to me It's meant to be smelled. It's meant to be touched. It felt. And then hold on. Christian just pulled up a picture on his phone and showed it to me. This is a bombastic side eye that I'm witnessing.

Yeah. Yeah. And you never know if it's like the taxidermist wanted it to look that way or it just felt that way or like it's a whole weird version of virtual reality. And speaking of them them the next number is one taxidermist per 15 000 people uh one taxidermist per 15 000 people that's what the british census said the london population was in the 1890s there was one taxidermist per 15 000 londoners that seems like a lot okay lond London in the 1890s. Now that you said that, that makes more sense. Because I was I was thinking I was like, that seems really high.

And then he said London in the 1890s. I was like, Oh, yeah, they were so into that. It was a huge business. And Smithsonian says that the British census recorded 369 full time taxidermists in London in 1891. And apparently that general era was the historical peak of this because most people didn't have easy access to photos, most people couldn't travel, but rich people were traveling and also doing a lot of sport hunting. And then also European countries were doing a lot of imperialism. So you have a lot of wealthy, powerful people bringing samples back

to show animals to people that way. A lot of people just carrying sacks of ocelots to their rich person's estate. We really, I think, underestimate the value of having access to photographs and the internet and zoos and books and stuff, because throughout most of history, if you had told people that there was like unicorns and dragons and stuff, they'd be like, yeah, sure. What do I know? Like they're very well, maybe, you know, like, and so taxidermy was just like a way you could show somebody an animal that there's no way they would have ever in their lives encountered for any other reason. Exactly. Yeah. And especially if somebody did acquire the animal, basically

ethically, like if they found a deceased animal or something like that's just good. You're able to educate people. You're able to show them the world by stuffing this and mounting it, doing it. This was just a huge business. And then with the rise of amateur photography and movie making at the start of the 1900s, you know, people just got a hold of better and cheaper pictures. Also in the mid 1900s, there started to be a real stigma against big game hunting. So it's really a mid to late 1800s peak for this practice. Yeah. And photographs of an animal feel a little less haunted than their skeleton inside sort of some foam and then their skin pulled over it yeah i feel like the skeletons

look creepier to me you know what i mean i don't know maybe like the skeletons like because of how often skeletons are used in like horror media and stuff i feel like skeletons imply like more decay and death than like with tax also i think with taxidermy sometimes there you get this weird uncanny valley effect where you're like that's definitely mostly what this animal looks like. But like... Just short. It's like something just a little bit, a little bit not quite right. For me, for some reason, taxidermied birds don't bother me at all. Most taxidermied mammals also don't bother me. But certain taxidermied mammals do kind of...

I think it's the ones that can have really expressive faces where I can like read their faces, like primates, dogs, cats, you know, I think that sometimes those, like I get, like I'm looking into their face and they're making an expression and I'm like, hmm. Don't like that. You're dead though. It really is uncanny because you almost feel like two minds are working. Like it's however the animal felt and lived and then however the human decided to present it.

And so it's like not quite real, but also it's objectively really the body of the animal. So you don't know. Yeah. I wonder if that's why fish taxidermy is so popular because fish don't really make any sort of facial expressions so it's hard to get them wrong i know have you ever looked directly into the eyes of a puffer fish we saw at the seattle aquarium last week we saw this porcupine fish biggest absolute unit was this lad and he was enormous and had just the most blissful empty-headed smile i've ever seen just you could

tell there was not a single thought in that big beautiful balloon of a fish oh fantastic parrotfish too parrotfish are very photogenic. Nothing going on between those eyes. Incredible. They've got that blank dream work smirk. Well, speaking of the more life like the mammals, the next number is a date. It is March 14th, 1933. The next number is a date. It is March 14th, 1933. So just about 100 years ago, March 14th, 1933. That is the date of the death of a sled dog named Balto. Speaking of movies. Oh, we love Balto. Very inaccurate movie, but also very good. Well, it turns out that Balto was famous in life and was taxed an ermine upon death. Like in 1925, Balto was part of a sled dog team going to the snowbound city of Nome, Alaska,

delivering medication. Balto was immediately famous from that. They made a Balto movie in the 1920s on like various reels of short film and old technology. And then there were 90s movies about him. But if you go to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, you can go see Balto. He's there. Wow. I mean, it'd be like if we, after the golden retriever that played Air Bud died,

we taxidermied him and put him on display. Like, look, it's all right. It's Air Bud. And put him in a little jersey yeah doing a dunk that's true because it's taxidermy you can pose them however you want so you can have them like mid-air yeah nothing but net yeah yet another thing that's not spelled out in the rules of basketball. How to taxidermy specifically. The rules do not say you cannot have a dead dog that has been stuffed play basketball.

And I'm going to link stuff about there are just a lot of hero dogs of the 20th century that then got taxidermied. It was a big practice. It was like, we're going to honor them and keep them around for people to see. And the other probably biggest example is two Soviet space dogs. Because they returned from Earth safely. In August of 1960, the Soviet mission Sputnik V became the first space mission to return life forms to Earth. Wow. Like still alive and everything.

And then we killed them and taxidermied them immediately. I think it was not immediate, which is good. I know. But you never know. I'm glad we're spelling it out. Honestly, I assume they just didn't survive reentry or something. Well, okay, so Laika did not survive, right? Okay.

Laika did not survive the journey. Like, the famous space dog, Laika, I think did not make it. I don't know if they ever even brought that vessel back. I don't know if it returned from orbit. That's a creepy thought. Right. It's just still out there. more of it that's a creepy thought right so it's just still out there all i know is that the the dog didn't did not last uh did not survive that trip but uh i'm glad to know that some of them

made it back and it was two dogs named belka and strelka who are now taxidermied in a museum in moscow for the cosmonaut period. Wow. Like you said earlier, that really highlights the difference in the way that we treat animals and the difference that we treat humans. Can you imagine if we just taxidermied all of our pop culture icons? Yeah. We kind of tried with the wax museums, but it's not such a thing with animals. We're like, yeah, put them up. Great. It's like, yeah, stuff them, throw them up in the exhibit. Who cares? I think with a lot of taxidermy of mammals, they are fluffy.

They are furry. And that fur does a good amount to sort of give them form, give them shape that makes them not look so creepy and sunken. So, like, I think that it's like when you see, if you ever see, like, a primate taxidermy where part of their face is also tax taxidermy especially with the older ones that face starts to look really rough it's not good yeah i guess the fur does a lot to mask the desiccation yeah unless it's something that is already very like either wrinkly or desiccated like a crocodile or an elephant and i have seen i have seen a taxidermied elephant head and even that uh it's quite old and even that looks pretty rough like it's yeah i feel like even if the the technique was a hundred percent perfect, you could get it to like lifelike visual quality. If you told me, hey, there is a dead human body that you can go look at. And even if it didn't look horrifying,

I think at a conceptual level, I still would not be interested in like sharing space with a dead human body. Okay. But what if it was connected to some servos and a recording and it'd be like, hello, I am President Lincoln. Y'all want to go see dead Lincoln? I heard they've got a traveling exhibit. He's in town for a couple weeks I just revealed that the Disney World Hall of Presidents

is all of their bodies for real like yeah it's all of them they just got them all I can't believe it I'm never gonna see it the same way again that is definitely for sure something that some parents tell their kids every single day I bet

I bet. I bet every day someone tricks some kid into thinking they're real, actual dead bodies. But yeah, so that's just like going on. It's many hero dogs, but not so much people in museums. And there's one more number here before the break. The number is 25. One more number here before the break. The number is 25. And 25 is the approximate dinner party capacity of a taxidermied blue whale in Sweden.

I've heard of this. And they do eat on the blue whale? Is this what is being implied here? Yeah, apparently they don't do it anymore. But for many decades, the main museum in Gothenburg, Sweden, had a taxidermy juvenile blue whale. But even a juvenile is big enough that inside of the whale, like the hollow interior, I've got one picture of it. A lot of the stories about it are kind of legendary feeling, but there's a picture of a bunch of people drinking coffee at a table inside of the blue whale. So that is something that has happened. You know, it does make me think a bit of whale fall where whale carcasses will fall to the bottom of the ocean. And that is a dead whale dinner party. I'll tell you what, a bunch of hagfishes, a bunch of crabs, a bunch of octopuses just go on ham on that whale. And here we are humans, no better than a hagfish because you mentioned that it was like it is taxidermied and i'm assuming that means that it is preserved in such a way that there is no longer any like muscle or flesh left on the blue whale but otherwise you could

have like that would be a really interesting concept of like a dinner party where they don't necessarily put the food down in front of you. You just reach around, like reach behind you and just kind of pull some down off the wall. This is how hagfish eat. They actually they drill into the dead whale and then there they are inside. The food is all around them. All right. I'm not thrilled about the I feel like I'm getting not a mental image, but like a mental smell. Like I'm imagining a smell and it's not good.

That amber grease just kind of trickling down from the ceiling. The children in that picture don't look too thrilled. Right. Kids in there. Yeah. Right. Kids in there, man. Mom, this is weird. Mom, where's the crocodile hanging from the ceiling? Because just like all the parts of the story are weird, too. Like apparently 1865, the year 1865, a juvenile blue whale beached itself on a

shore in Sweden and they didn't think they could get it back in the water. And so museum curator August Wilhelm Malm sprang into action, had it hauled down to Gothenburg for him to taxidermy it. They for decades had dinner parties inside. Apparently, visitors can still, like, enter it. But there is a rumor, this is not, like, verifiable, but there's a rumor that sometime in the 1930s, museum staff caught a human couple having sex inside the whale. And then they shut down, like, events inside the whale. That was it. That sounds right.

I mean. That was it. That sounds right. That's it. I doubt that they like scheduled an event to have sex inside the whale. Surely. Yeah. Passion just struck in the moment. They were all up in that dead whale and they were like, I can't keep my hands off of you. No, I mean, I think they did plan it. This seems like a premeditated whale coitus but i

doubt they signed up like in the sign up sheet coitus in the whale this is a missed opportunity for them to market it as like come get it on inside this way I didn't know if I could say bad words. Sorry. Come do it inside the whale. Too bad it wasn't a sperm whale. Which they are actually called sperm whales because this sort of fluid inside their heads looks like sperm to the whalers. So that like the joke like, hee hee, it's actually pretty accurate if you're having sex inside of a whale it's a real nesting doll situation isn't it like yeah because then does your baby come out as whale? Yeah. Well, folks, that's our numbers and a takeaway.

When we come back from a short break, we'll have a couple more takeaways about the future of taxidermy and biological science in general. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney.

I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory.

The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Folks, we have two more takeaways in the main episode. Also, I did not check in with Katie about her relationship to taxidermy or opinion of it. And Katie, how do you feel about it? So I actually don't have too much of a problem with taxidermy as long as it's done sort of scientifically and not, you know, you're not just like killing the animal to taxidermy it. But I have a story about someone who I think was an ethical taxidermist, also a potential roommate. So I was

trying to find a place to stay out in Los Angeles, which is very hard if you want to keep any of your money. So I was looking for roommates and I wasn't so picky. And one of the people who put up like a listing on Craigslist was like, you know just you got to be okay with taxidermy it's like all right i'm fine with taxidermy that's fine um and then i find out that by okay with taxidermy she would be doing taxidermy in the apartment and uh yeah and like you know i was kind of i was like okay well if she does it in her room, that's fine. And then also, no, she would need the fridge, at least the freezer to store roadkill that she finds because that is what she would taxidermy. And I was still like, yeah, but it's really cheap.

So maybe. so maybe and then she started talking about like how she owns some dogs and like how she is planning on taxidermying their ears when they die and then i was like you know maybe i keep looking but probably a cool person i was probably being way too judgmental well i i think that i have heard that a lot of because i i know people who do like taxidermy even just like as a hobby for fun and i think a common way of like cleaning bones and cleaning like soft tissue off of bones for taxidermy is to use beetles like yeah beetling beetles is a thing where they like basically put the tub like put the remains in a in a tub of beetles so i'm imagining this person also probably kept beetles

like i'd be cool with that you know actually my i'm sort of being a little glib but my real reason for not is uh i'm very sensitive to smell so i none of that would be so gross for me to not be able to deal with. The flesh-eating beetles, roadkill in the freezer. It would be the smell. I wouldn't be able to. Like I can't really handle the smell from aldehyde that well or other strong chemical scents. So, you know, a lovely person though. I strongly recommend being their roommate if you can handle the smell of decaying animal carcasses.

Whenever I think about trying to do this with beetles or not, it feels like a real garage activity. Right? Like you can put it in a garage. This is an outside toy. Ventilation being the key. Yeah, with the door all the way open and sure yeah alright that would work but in the house not so much these are outside smells

yeah this is yard behavior yeah yeah get out there get stuff in you know but maybe not in my room get out there get stuff in that's the tagline i think yeah it's like the rick steves of taxidermy is like keep on stuffing oh man i'm just walking me through the blue whale where the sex happened i'm into it that

sounds great i want him specifically. Keep on stuffin'. Well, and kind of speaking of all this, the next big takeaway here is about the potential future. Because takeaway number two, taxidermy was once a form of virtual reality, and it might get replaced by the digital version. In researching this topic, there was just sort of a mental leap that I got to make, which is that, oh yeah, in the past, this was basically VR. It was a big stuffed animal, but it's a virtual experience of an animal. And because digital VR is getting so good, some museums are going that way instead. I've played some games that are like you

know well christian's played vr games yeah you have a vr headset and you've played a lot of games on there um and it's cool because it does like there are a lot of vr programs that let you basically virtually explore a place that you probably otherwise never would have gotten to um or never would have been able to see and you can do it all from like the comfort of your house basically um so i could definitely see how like that would fill that role of letting you experience things that otherwise you normally never would have gotten to because of the sort of portability of it yeah that too it can just be set up in front of people and you know especially as taxidermists got great at it they'd try to make it an amazing diorama and like pair animals with each other and in sort of a way that modern zoos do now with living animals that that won't eat each other so much yeah and yeah it is it is kind

of an experience to go up close to a taxidermy of a large animal that you would normally not get that face-to-face interaction with like a tiger or a polar bear where you really get the sense of their size. Like I've been to a lot of museums, really love checking out the taxidermy. And always when I go up to like see the full size of a tiger or a polar bear, it's like, yeah, you're like, oh yeah, that would kill me. That'd kill me good also like having seen pictures and videos and stuff of zoos of the past and how zoos have been built and the sort of like life that animals living in zoos went through at even just like a few decades ago, it was pretty bleak. So taxidermy was probably a much more humane way of like educating people about animals and letting them, you know, see what the

animal was like and what it would have looked like and stuff without the sort of, uh, horrid conditions that zoos, you know, would keep animals in before there was any sort of you know welfare uh checks like any sort of system in place to make sure that the animals were being properly cared for so like in the historical context taxidermy i guess would have been preferable to the kind of life that animals would have had living in a poorly outfitted zoo. Yeah, old zoos used to just be some guy going like, look at this, I've got a zebra in my closet. A lot of concrete.

A lot of concrete and bars. Yeah, it was not a vibe at all. I imagine people seeing the closet zebra and being like, wow, no bars, that zebra must be really happy. But it's like, you know. Yeah, that was upscale. Yeah, and that's all dead on. Like this taxidermy, it could just be where it is.

And theoretically, it could be sourced ethically. Usually it wasn't. But today, VR is so good that that is presenting a situation where we might just stop making taxidermy and get rid of the old stuff. Big example is New York Times covered a permanent VR exhibit that's now at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Quoting the New York Times, visitors can take a trip to an ice blue celestial plane surrounded by an aurora borealis. There, a branching orb traces 460 species, including humans, back to the last universal common ancestor, which is a small single-celled organism

thought to be the common origin of all current life on Earth, end quote. So it's like one VR headset, and you get the entire history of evolution. It's just more powerful and immersive than taxidermy can be. That's available to us now. That's awesome. Question. Can you have sex inside the orb? That one's in a different part

of Paris. Look at us writing Black Mirror. Look at us doing it. Wow. Look at us writing Black Mirror. Look at us doing it. Wow. Look at us. But yeah, like that Paris exhibit, they put that up in 2018. So this technology has been this good for a while. It's just basically a process of museums spending the money and installing it and finding a room for it.

And then as VR catches on, other museums are retiring their existing taxidermy. In 2018, the Bell Museum of Natural History in Minnesota, they moved all their collections to a new building, and they just took that as an opportunity to dismantle or throw away some taxidermy. Throw it away? Where? Where are they throwing this away? No reason. Which dumpster exactly? And when is it not monitored just next time we tape me and katie will both have really cool stuff on the walls like yeah look at this unrelated though my chair is just going to be entirely made out of ocelots. Oh, yeah. And also with this going on, apparently the taxidermy profession is declining, too.

Back in 2010, the Smithsonian Institution, a whole set of museums, they allowed their last taxidermist to retire and didn't replace the position. And apparently it was a taxidermist named Paul Reimer, who had worked there for 25 years and was also a third-generation taxidermist. His father and grandfather were also taxidermists at the Smithsonian. Wow, what a family legacy. Imagine growing up in that house, just the nightmares as a child, seeing your father stooped over a beaver carcass but that was probably like you know the the memories that that you probably have of like your dad i don't know

sitting around watching tv reading the newspaper drinking a beer like that is as normal to you as like oh dad's wrist deep in beaver bones. Yeah, I mean, when it's like, oh, let's toss the old pigskin around, literally. Like, you think the resolution on your TV is really bad when you're watching football games? Like, it's just a brown spot is the ball? That can't be it. It's not a lifelike entire pig.

Listen, some people's dads teach them how to throw a perfect spiral or how to change a tire but some people's dads teach them how to mount a an entire hog yeah well and also like last thing i say with that takeaway is basically what you just said like there are people still doing taxidermy. I'm going to link an article from Smithsonian Magazine covering, like, modern practitioners who do it ethically and for various clients. Like, people still buy it for displays or for their houses. And also, the American Museum of Natural History in New York recently spent $2.5 million refurbishing its taxidermy. So, you know, there are still museums where they're keeping it up. There are others where they're saying digital virtual reality has caught up with taxidermy virtual reality. Let's do that. Well, one of the, one of the things that we kind of got an appreciation for in the biodiversity museum was that like taxidermy isn't just for decoration or like display or show right because a lot of like the the specimens that they had in

this research museum were you know taxidermy but not necessarily for show they would be right uh taxidermied into like the most compact and space saving position they could possibly get them in so that later on if scientists wanted to come back and do research involving a specimen of that species they could yeah you've got to find it yeah basically like checking out a book from a library right um and they were taxidermied so but not in a way to like look pretty it's just in a way to like preserve the information that we have about this species yeah yeah i mean like they would pull out samples to check for mammals that can biofloresce under uv light and it's like ah well you know we've got a bunch of dead animals so we can check that out with them um Have you ever seen a taxidermy collection of birds that is not for display, just sort of in the archives?

Yeah, that's what we saw at the museum. We saw them like because we actually got to see somebody that was a researcher that was going through the archive and like opening the drawers and taking them out and stuff like for whatever research they were doing. So we got to see some of like the the preserved specimens of birds and it's a little scary looking because they're like yeah kind of folded up with their like head back and like beak pointing up sort of um but it was so it's definitely not the sort of like pretty looking taxidermy you're used to seeing no they're they're shoved in there like cutlery it There's so many birds per square inch. And with that kind of taxidermy, they don't bother with things like replacing the eyes with fake glass eyes and that kind of thing? No.

Yeah, so it looks a little gnarlier. But I thought it was cool because it felt to me like I got to see what it's like to actually do the research work. And taxidermy has a huge place in research work so i was i was excited to see that that is so interesting that difference between display taxidermy and filed away for business taxidermy and because because you just approach it so differently you're like the bear doesn't need to be cool it's just uh it's it's a business bear i'm not one of those showboats, like Teddy Rose Belt or whoever, that put this up in his den. Yeah. It's a tactical taxidermy. Well, and all this leads into the last takeaway for the main episode. That's quick, but it's

takeaway number three. The world's collection of taxidermy could be a useful repository of old DNA. And this is a little of a speculative story. I couldn't find much evidence of this leading to breakthroughs or anything right now. But there is potential new value in these old displays being a source of extractable DNA in spite of all the many preservative things used to keep it up and also in spite of the age of it. Yeah, because I mean, you're basically getting tons of like preserved hair and skin cells and stuff like that, where you're going to have DNA packed away in there. And we actually just the episodes that we just put up this week, we talked a lot about like the de-extinction debates and discourse around de-extincting animals. And I think a lot of that relies on taxidermied specimens.

Even with existing animals, apparently the main story of an existing species for this, it's from 2015. the main story of an existing species for this. It's from 2015. A team at Penn State University got DNA from like a piece of university taxidermy. It's a taxidermied version of the school mascot, the Nittany Lion. If people don't know, Nittany Lions is the team mascot. That's sort of a funny name for a mountain lion. It's just a mountain lion from a location called Mount Nittany that is near the school. But they had an 1856 taxidermied mountain lion. And then the Harrisburg Patriot News newspaper says that in 2015, a university team took DNA from it and quote, the ultimate goal is to sequence the DNA and compare that to DNA sequences in genes of mountain That's really cool. You know how there's like funny taxidermy, like a squirrel wearing a cowboy hat riding an armadillo? Yeah.

Like the very silly creative taxidermy. I'd love it if like someone's bookend at some point, like scientists reach out and we're like, we need this. We need to extract the DNA from your cowboy squirrel because this is actually a rare red squirrel that we need to sequence the DNA from. Yeah. Like part of your jackalope can save the world, you know,

like great. Okay. Cool. I heard about a story not too long ago where somebody like in their house just happened to have like a taxidermy thylacine, which went extinct like almost a hundred years ago. And somebody just like had one in their house. I'm trying trying to remember i don't know the details of the story but like it was a weird place that it should not have been and they found one like a whole taxidermied one is that is that the same

story where they found the remains of the last living thylacine like in a museum cabinet or something is that what i'm thinking of maybe it was something where they did not know it was there and they they just happened upon like oh oh whoops it was just sitting in a cabinet somewhere yeah but i think there was a different story where somebody found like a taxidermy thylacine where there wasn't supposed to be one i could imagine at least some of these being somewhat humorous to people because other examples of existing species I could find. Apparently a 2017 study at Trinity College Dublin looked at the DNA of local taxidermied goats. And there was a 2020 study in Australia where they looked at DNA from a taxidermied lobster. It just seems increasingly like funny taxidermy

will play into this for real. Like, sure. And then also, you know, people, these taxidermies can be like old paintings or something where we just find them in attics. So that totally makes sense that somebody just had an extinct species and was like, oh, yeah, that's just, I just like scared the kids with it in the attic. Is that a thing? Is that useful? Okay, great. That's one thing that I do find really valuable about taxidermy is that it can be a way of like preserving a species that we either have lost or might lose. It's an interesting way of like getting to connect with an animal that doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. And that's, you know, I enjoyed coming out of this research being more excited about taxidermy than I was. I think I was pretty

neutral about it, but, you know, I don't need people to like go do it today, but the stuff we have is like kind of strangely useful and also a real artifact of how all media entertainment knowledge used to work. Yeah. I also do appreciate that like people that are doing taxidermy now, I think because of the access to communication with each other and access to information and technology that we have now is like taxidermy is in a much more ethical place now than I think it has been in the past. So people that are doing it now, I think are doing it a lot more ethically than they may have typically done it in the past. So, I mean, if you're still doing taxidermy and you're doing it like ethically and responsibly,

good on you. You're doing it. Yeah. Like collecting, like collecting roadkill and putting it in the freezer you share with your roommate. like collecting roadkill and putting it in the freezer you share with your roommate. Katie, whoever took that spot is listening to this episode right now. They're like, oh, I almost didn't get this part, but cool. I'm probably missing out. Man, there would have probably been so many cool skunks and possums. You could have had a free possum. I know. Could have had a chair made out of dead possums the one that got away folks that's the main episode for this week.

Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, a lot of the world's oldest extant taxidermy is specifically crocodiles in European churches and government buildings. Takeaway number two, taxidermy was once a primary form of virtual reality, and it might get replaced by the digital version. And then takeaway number three, the world's supply of taxidermy could be a useful repository of old DNA. Exodermy could be a useful repository of old DNA. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show at our network, MaximumFun.org, members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating

story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a guy named William Temple Hornaday, who is a taxidermist and very complex figure who helped save the American bison. And you know I love bison. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show for a library of more than 11 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows. Also new Boco from the Maximum Fun Drive that we're on the tail end of. You've got a special show with me and Katie and David Christopher Bell. You've got a bunch of special shows from Christian and Ellen Weatherford, our buddies from Just the Zoo of Us who guested this week, and a catalog of all sorts of other MaxFun stuff. It is special audio. It is just for members. Thank you so much for being somebody who backs this podcast operation, who joined in the Maximum Fun Drive party or any other party. It

is always a good time to join. Additional fun things, check out our research sources. On this episode's page at MaximumFun.org, key sources this week include the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Atlas Obscura, and digital resources from Westminster Abbey. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca, and I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. And Christian and Ellen each recorded this on the traditional land of the Timuquia-speaking Mokama people. Also want to acknowledge that in mine and Ellen and Christian's locations, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere,

Native people are very much still here. And that feels worth doing on each episode. And join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, I have a randomly incredibly fascinating tip for you on another episode. Because each week I put all of our episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's random episode is episode 52, which is about number two pencils.

It turns out one number two pencil can write more than 100,000 words. Somebody checked. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. I also recommend our buddies Ellen and Christian Weatherford's podcast, Just the Zoo of Us, a maximum fun show where they rate animals in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics, which are just surprisingly comprehensive categories when you listen.

It really works. I'm also going to link Ellen's podcast, Spellbound and Gagged, which has had amazing guests such as Katie Golden. We're buddies. You know, it was really nice to make this together, and I'm sure we'll do stuff again soon. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating so how about that talk to you then MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned.

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