Things you didn't know about... taxidermists

Taxidermists don't actually stuff animals
They mount the skin on a sculpture of the animal. While some ready-made mounts are available, a taxidermist often creates the sculpture from scratch. So taxidermists must be experts on anatomy and art as well as the removal and preservation of skins.

Fantasy creatures (stuffed)
Forget rogue trading, here's rogue taxidermy! This is when a taxidermist uses parts of two or more animals to create a fabulous beast. In Sweden, a mythical creature called a skvader was made real by taxidermists—it has the head and legs of a hare and the body of a grouse. The American jackalope is another popular subject of rogue taxidermy, as are fairytale creatures such as dragons and griffins.

Tall fish-tales
Another fictitious creature created by taxidermists is the fur-bearing beaver trout. Legend has it that the hairy fish lives in the cold waters of North America. In the 1930s photographer Ralph Sessions used to sell postcards of fish wrapped in fur. Taxidermists took the joke one step further, and now beaver trout crop up in museums the world over!

Taxidermists and modern art
Taxidermy is a popular technique in radical modern art. An "anthropomorphic taxidermist" makes animals resemble humans by dressing them in clothes or putting them in human situations, often to powerful if surreal effect.

Artist Maurizio Cattelan created Bidibidobidiboo, an installation showing a squirrel slumped at its kitchen table, having shot himself. Another of his sculptures consisted of a stuffed elephant with a sheet resembling a Ku Klux Klan uniform draped over it.

Taxider-mummy!
The first form of taxidermy was mummification. The ancient Egyptians used to mummify both humans and animals by removing their organs and filling the bodies with straw and preservatives (the earliest modern taxidermic specimens date from about 1500 and include a rhinoceros in the Royal Museum of Vertebrates in Florence).

Pet taxidermy is controversial
Losing a beloved pet is very painful, and people may feel that having the pet mounted by a taxidermist will ease the pain.

Some taxidermists claim it's impossible to give a mounted pet any of its original personality, however, and may refuse to mount pets for fear of disappointing the owner.

That said, specialist pet taxidermists have preserved thousands of dogs, cats and even rats and hamsters over the years.

A whale of a task
After the sad death of the whale that swam up the Thames in January 2006 many people wanted to take the carcass to a taxidermist. But the project was abandoned. While a taxidermist could mount such a large creature, whales have no fur and the skin would lose its colour.