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The Taxidermy Timeline
Milestones from the first known mounts to modern techniques, arranged by era — with links into the essays, books, and archival sources in this collection.
Explore the timelineTaxidermy Glossary
Tanning, fur dressing, mounting, head-forming and the rest of the trade's vocabulary — defined as the historical manuals use them.
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Frequently asked questions about taxidermy history
When did taxidermy start?
Animal preservation is ancient — Egyptian embalmers were treating dogs, cats, and birds by around 2200 BC — but that work was ritual, not display. Recognisable mounted specimens appear in European curiosity cabinets from the sixteenth century, and taxidermy became a stable trade only after arsenical soap made long-term preservation reliable in the late eighteenth century. The first printed taxidermy manuals followed in the 1820s.
Who invented taxidermy?
No single person invented taxidermy. The decisive shifts were chemical and sculptural: arsenical soap, developed in the eighteenth century, solved preservation, and the move from packed skins to sculpted anatomical forms was driven by museum workers including William T. Hornaday, Carl Akeley, and John Rowley. Akeley's clay-over-armature method, cast into a light hollow manikin, is still the basis of museum-quality mounting.
Where does the word 'taxidermy' come from?
From the Greek taxis, meaning arrangement, and derma, meaning skin — literally 'the arrangement of skin.' The term was popularised by Louis Dufresne of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris in the early nineteenth century, and it spread through the French museum literature that followed. Earlier practitioners called their trade 'stuffing' or 'preserving' animals.