Two deer lock antlers in a vicious fight for supremacy. A pair of peacocks clash, their claws unfurled to slash at their opponent. A lone wolf prowls close by, teeth bared.
Passengers on the number 17 bus passing by the anonymous industrial estate in an Edinburgh suburb would be startled to find out what's going on behind the double doors of a shed in a distant corner of the estate that houses the collections centre of National Museums Scotland (NMS).
Here, the museum's taxidermy team - Phil Howard and Ebony Williams - are preparing animals for a new exhibition that will be unveiled in 2011 as part of the Royal Museum redevelopment project.
No less than four new galleries will showcase the taxidermist's art, with animals fighting, mating and feeding. But it's a long, painstaking task. "Just cleaning the skin of this peacock can take a day," says Howard.
Andrew Kitchener, principal curator of mammals and birds at the NMS, is enthusiastic about the role of taxidermy in exhibitions. "The point is to show animals doing something. If you can do it as realistically as possible, you can feel that the animal is going to move. That's what captures people's imaginations."
But traditional dioramas with stuffed specimens are now as rare as some of the species they feature. The decline in museum taxidermy can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s when "stuffed" animals (in fact, they were rarely stuffed) were seen as old fashioned. Many specimens were battered, poorly maintained and often badly executed.
Changing attitudes to animal welfare also played a part. Curators were anxious about the provenance of the specimens, as many older exhibits had been killed specifically for museum display.
Taxidermists now use roadkill or corpses from zoos. Cuts also led to the closure of conservation departments and taxidermy units in the 1980s and early 1990s, consigning collections to the storage room.
Taxidermy back on display
But now, a renewed interest in the natural world is giving taxidermy a lease of life. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum repaired and restored much of its extensive collection of birds and mammals for its reopening in 2006.
At Weston Park in Sheffield, a poll of visitors found that Snowy, the museum's stuffed polar bear, was the most popular item in the collection.
When the museum reopened in 2007, Snowy had an entire gallery built around him. And in 2004, the NMS's Cats exhibition, which featured stuffed examples of every cat variety in the world, attracted 40,000 visitors in 15 weeks, making it one of the most successful exhibitions in the museum's history.
Nick Gordon, managing curator of the New Walk Museum, reopened the Leicester museum in 2003 with an "immersive" gallery of natural history, where visitors can touch the displays and the animals are shown in their natural habitats.
"Taxidermy allows you to appreciate the scale and feel of the animals, but it must be done to a very high quality," Gordon says. "There's nothing worse than some old shabby specimen with its eyes in the wrong place."
He dismisses some of the ethical concerns about displaying stuffed animals. "When we opened, I braced myself for loads of complaints about the taxidermy. None came. In fact, we got hundreds of appreciative comments."
The collections seen by the public are a small fraction of those available to scientists. The Natural History Museum (NHM) has 20,000 taxidermy mounts out of nearly 5 million specimens. Many of these will be flat or study 'skins', wet preserved and skeletal material that can be either articulated or disarticulated and used for research.
Forensic significance
In Weston Park, mounted and unmounted specimens are used for training volunteers to identify species. Much of the research into bird habits relies on observation by members of the public.
"The collection can show the variety of colours, sizes and shades that occur even within the same species," says Alastair McLean, the curator of natural history at Museums Sheffield.
In Edinburgh, the NMS's freezers are often raided by scientists working on genetics research, says Kitchener. Muscle tissue from two Arabian oryxes from Oman provided DNA samples which have been used for research into colour vision. Other specimens have been used to track illegally traded tigers or to date bone fragments.
Michael Harvey, interpretation manager at the NHM, says there will always be a place for taxidermy in museum display - but only as one of many tools available to curators. He says that film, digital media, interactive displays all have their place alongside the traditional stuffed animals.
"It all depends on what you are trying to do - a mounted specimen might be an ideal way to make an emotional point, but you might turn to video for something explaining animal behaviour."
Hirst and a new enthusiasm
But even if taxidermy does have a future in museums, the Guild of Taxidermists is worried that taxidermists may not. Only a handful of museums, such as the NMS and New Walk Museum, employ their own taxidermist.
Duncan Ferguson, chairman of the Guild and the mastermind behind the repair of the Kelvingrove collection, says most members with museum experience are on or near retirement age, and membership of the Guild has fallen by more than a third in recent years.
"They are not being replaced because there are no jobs in the sector and there are no courses that people can go on," he says.
Help may be at hand in the unlikely form of Damien Hirst, whose sharks and calves in formaldehyde have sparked an interest in the craft for a new generation of art students.
Hirst is not the only artist who uses taxidermy. Sculptor and taxidermist Emily Mayer has developed a technique called erosion moulding that creates very real-looking animals and birds. Mayer has also had solo exhibitions of her work.
There is also the artist Polly Morgan, whose first solo UK exhibition, The Exquisite Corpse, was held in 2007. She uses taxidermy to place animals and birds in unusual settings. Andrea Roe, who recently had an artist-in-residency at NMS, uses taxidermy to translate research into the psychology of animal behaviour into artworks.
All three artists command high prices for works that involve mounted animals. And NMS's two taxidermy apprenticeship places have seen a steady stream of fine arts graduates gain experience at the museum.
Ebony Williams is the latest trainee. She looks on taxidermy as a form of sculpture, only working with organic materials. She says her work at the museum influences her art - exploring new avenues of "zoological controversy" and our habit of viewing animals as "commodities, whether eating them for meat, using them for leather shoes and clothes or viewing them in museums".
Patrick Kelly is a freelance journalist
Passengers on the number 17 bus passing by the anonymous industrial estate in an Edinburgh suburb would be startled to find out what's going on behind the double doors of a shed in a distant corner of the estate that houses the collections centre of National Museums Scotland (NMS).
Here, the museum's taxidermy team - Phil Howard and Ebony Williams - are preparing animals for a new exhibition that will be unveiled in 2011 as part of the Royal Museum redevelopment project.
No less than four new galleries will showcase the taxidermist's art, with animals fighting, mating and feeding. But it's a long, painstaking task. "Just cleaning the skin of this peacock can take a day," says Howard.
Andrew Kitchener, principal curator of mammals and birds at the NMS, is enthusiastic about the role of taxidermy in exhibitions. "The point is to show animals doing something. If you can do it as realistically as possible, you can feel that the animal is going to move. That's what captures people's imaginations."
But traditional dioramas with stuffed specimens are now as rare as some of the species they feature. The decline in museum taxidermy can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s when "stuffed" animals (in fact, they were rarely stuffed) were seen as old fashioned. Many specimens were battered, poorly maintained and often badly executed.
Changing attitudes to animal welfare also played a part. Curators were anxious about the provenance of the specimens, as many older exhibits had been killed specifically for museum display.
Taxidermists now use roadkill or corpses from zoos. Cuts also led to the closure of conservation departments and taxidermy units in the 1980s and early 1990s, consigning collections to the storage room.
Taxidermy back on display
But now, a renewed interest in the natural world is giving taxidermy a lease of life. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum repaired and restored much of its extensive collection of birds and mammals for its reopening in 2006.
At Weston Park in Sheffield, a poll of visitors found that Snowy, the museum's stuffed polar bear, was the most popular item in the collection.
When the museum reopened in 2007, Snowy had an entire gallery built around him. And in 2004, the NMS's Cats exhibition, which featured stuffed examples of every cat variety in the world, attracted 40,000 visitors in 15 weeks, making it one of the most successful exhibitions in the museum's history.
Nick Gordon, managing curator of the New Walk Museum, reopened the Leicester museum in 2003 with an "immersive" gallery of natural history, where visitors can touch the displays and the animals are shown in their natural habitats.
"Taxidermy allows you to appreciate the scale and feel of the animals, but it must be done to a very high quality," Gordon says. "There's nothing worse than some old shabby specimen with its eyes in the wrong place."
He dismisses some of the ethical concerns about displaying stuffed animals. "When we opened, I braced myself for loads of complaints about the taxidermy. None came. In fact, we got hundreds of appreciative comments."
The collections seen by the public are a small fraction of those available to scientists. The Natural History Museum (NHM) has 20,000 taxidermy mounts out of nearly 5 million specimens. Many of these will be flat or study 'skins', wet preserved and skeletal material that can be either articulated or disarticulated and used for research.
Forensic significance
In Weston Park, mounted and unmounted specimens are used for training volunteers to identify species. Much of the research into bird habits relies on observation by members of the public.
"The collection can show the variety of colours, sizes and shades that occur even within the same species," says Alastair McLean, the curator of natural history at Museums Sheffield.
In Edinburgh, the NMS's freezers are often raided by scientists working on genetics research, says Kitchener. Muscle tissue from two Arabian oryxes from Oman provided DNA samples which have been used for research into colour vision. Other specimens have been used to track illegally traded tigers or to date bone fragments.
Michael Harvey, interpretation manager at the NHM, says there will always be a place for taxidermy in museum display - but only as one of many tools available to curators. He says that film, digital media, interactive displays all have their place alongside the traditional stuffed animals.
"It all depends on what you are trying to do - a mounted specimen might be an ideal way to make an emotional point, but you might turn to video for something explaining animal behaviour."
Hirst and a new enthusiasm
But even if taxidermy does have a future in museums, the Guild of Taxidermists is worried that taxidermists may not. Only a handful of museums, such as the NMS and New Walk Museum, employ their own taxidermist.
Duncan Ferguson, chairman of the Guild and the mastermind behind the repair of the Kelvingrove collection, says most members with museum experience are on or near retirement age, and membership of the Guild has fallen by more than a third in recent years.
"They are not being replaced because there are no jobs in the sector and there are no courses that people can go on," he says.
Help may be at hand in the unlikely form of Damien Hirst, whose sharks and calves in formaldehyde have sparked an interest in the craft for a new generation of art students.
Hirst is not the only artist who uses taxidermy. Sculptor and taxidermist Emily Mayer has developed a technique called erosion moulding that creates very real-looking animals and birds. Mayer has also had solo exhibitions of her work.
There is also the artist Polly Morgan, whose first solo UK exhibition, The Exquisite Corpse, was held in 2007. She uses taxidermy to place animals and birds in unusual settings. Andrea Roe, who recently had an artist-in-residency at NMS, uses taxidermy to translate research into the psychology of animal behaviour into artworks.
All three artists command high prices for works that involve mounted animals. And NMS's two taxidermy apprenticeship places have seen a steady stream of fine arts graduates gain experience at the museum.
Ebony Williams is the latest trainee. She looks on taxidermy as a form of sculpture, only working with organic materials. She says her work at the museum influences her art - exploring new avenues of "zoological controversy" and our habit of viewing animals as "commodities, whether eating them for meat, using them for leather shoes and clothes or viewing them in museums".
Patrick Kelly is a freelance journalist
The stuff of legend
The term taxidermy comes from the Greek "taxis" (arrangement) and "derma" (skin). Animal skin is cleaned, preserved and then stretched onto a body-shaped frame or mould usually made from fibre glass. Cotton and rags are no longer used.
The process can be traced back to the beginnings of civilisation, but the earliest surviving examples date back to the late 18th century, including examples from collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), a physician and naturalist. Bird specimens collected on the voyages of Captain Cook are held at the Natural History Museum at Tring.
In the Victorian era, taxidermy became a popular attraction, with taxidermists competing to display their skills in anthropomorphic tableaux of cats or mice in human dress sitting at tables, fishing or drinking in taverns; many households used preserved hippopotamus and rhinoceros feet as furniture. This era also pioneered the study of extinct species such as the great auk.
Professional taxidermists are now mainly employed in the mounting of hunting trophies or family pets.
The term taxidermy comes from the Greek "taxis" (arrangement) and "derma" (skin). Animal skin is cleaned, preserved and then stretched onto a body-shaped frame or mould usually made from fibre glass. Cotton and rags are no longer used.
The process can be traced back to the beginnings of civilisation, but the earliest surviving examples date back to the late 18th century, including examples from collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), a physician and naturalist. Bird specimens collected on the voyages of Captain Cook are held at the Natural History Museum at Tring.
In the Victorian era, taxidermy became a popular attraction, with taxidermists competing to display their skills in anthropomorphic tableaux of cats or mice in human dress sitting at tables, fishing or drinking in taverns; many households used preserved hippopotamus and rhinoceros feet as furniture. This era also pioneered the study of extinct species such as the great auk.
Professional taxidermists are now mainly employed in the mounting of hunting trophies or family pets.