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| Joseph Ciringione of Providence, RI |
The hunter and the taxidermist are common companions, with many trophy hunters sending the skulls, skins, and bones of their quarry to the taxidermist to be crafted into lifelike facsimiles, stereotypically as heads but often as full-body mounts.
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| Image source: mentalfloss.com |
Beyond merely festooning the studies of the gentleman explorer, hunting and taxidermy have together also played an active role in the advancement of our understanding of the natural world. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, much of what we now know today about animals was drawn from the mounted taxidermy specimens visible in many of the world's museum collections.
In its infancy, the natural science of zoology and its associated fields has largely relied on the hunter, insect collector, and angler to supply them with specimens to broaden humankind's collective knowledge of the animal world. It fell upon the taxidermist to act as a sculptor, immortalizing a specimen in a lifelike mount that could then be displayed, either on its own or in the realistic backdrop of a diorama.
At first glance, science would have doomed many of these creatures to extinction. In truth, many of the advocates of conservation in the era were the scientist-hunters themselves. Extinction was already well-documented in the early 20th century and many of these researchers and artisans expressed a desire to protect the natural environments that the animals they've studied, correctly linking habitat loss (along with genuine overexploitation) as the prime cause of decline.
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| Image source: io9.com |
Although museums no longer set out expeditions to furbish their museums with specimens of large vertebrate animals, they do still benefit from the presence of laboratory specimens. Even today, both sport and subsistence hunters regularly donate pelt and plumage specimens to the zoology departments of natural history museums, bolstering their collections and providing them with ample material for further research.
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| Joe Ciringione |
