Preparation
- Bird skin (study skin)
- A specimen prepared flat and unmounted, stuffed lightly with cotton for storage in a museum drawer. Study skins preserve scientific data rather than a lifelike attitude.
- Cape
- The skin of the head, neck, and shoulders removed for a shoulder mount. A well-cut cape leaves enough hide behind the shoulder for the taxidermist to trim and fit.
- Dermestid beetles
- Flesh-eating beetles kept in colonies to clean skulls and skeletons. A museum staple since the early 20th century — and the same family of insects that destroys neglected mounts.
- Fleshing
- Scraping every trace of muscle, fat, and membrane from the inside of a hide, historically over a beam with a two-handled fleshing knife, later with a rotating fleshing wheel.
- Rehydration
- Returning a dried or salted skin to a workable state in a salt-and-water bath — essential when working the shikar trophies and trade skins that arrived at supply houses months after collection.
- Taxidermy
- From the Greek taxis (arrangement) and derma (skin): the arrangement of skin. The practice of preserving an animal's skin and mounting it over a form for study or display.
- Wet specimen
- A whole animal preserved in fluid — historically spirits of wine, later formalin and ethanol. The default for fish, amphibians, and reptiles long before skin mounting became reliable for them.
Tanning & Chemistry
- Arsenical soap
- A preservative paste of arsenic, camphor, soap, and potash brushed onto the flesh side of a skin to deter insects. Attributed to Jean-Baptiste Bécoeur in the 18th century, it made permanent bird collections possible and remained standard until modern borax-based substitutes replaced it.
- Degreasing
- Removing natural fats from a skin with solvents, detergents, or sawdust. Skipped or done badly, residual grease bleeds through the hair and slips the skin years later.
- Fur dressing
- The trade of tanning a pelt with the hair left on and finishing it soft enough to wear or display — fleshing, pickling, tanning, drumming in sawdust, and combing out. Distinct from leather tanning, where the hair is removed.
- Pickling
- Soaking a fleshed skin in an acid-and-salt bath before tanning. The pickle swells and cleans the hide, sets the hair, and stops bacterial slip.
- Slippage (hair slip)
- Loss of hair or feathers when bacteria attack the follicles in an unsalted or under-pickled skin. The commonest and least repairable failure in the trade.
- Tanning
- Chemically converting a raw hide into a stable, rot-proof material. Historic shops used alum ('tawing') and vegetable bark liquors; modern practice uses chrome and synthetic syntans. Tanning stabilises the skin; mounting gives it form.
Mounting & Form
- Armature
- The internal skeleton of wire, iron rod, or steel that carries the weight of a mount and fixes its pose. Rowley's steel armatures let museums build large-mammal groups that stood without visible supports.
- Head-forming
- Building the head of a mount so the skin sits over anatomically correct structure: modelling the skull or a cast head form, setting the eyes in clay, and shaping lips, nostrils, and ear butts. In the 19th century the head was wound over the cleaned skull; the 20th-century supply houses sold moulded head forms in graded sizes.
- Manikin (mannequin)
- The sculpted body form a skin is fitted over. Successive generations used excelsior-and-twine bodies, laminated papier-mâché shells cast from clay sculptures, and — from the 1960s — polyurethane foam forms bought by catalog.
- Mounting
- Fitting a tanned skin over a form and working it into a lifelike pose — the step that distinguishes taxidermy from tanning. Nineteenth-century writers preferred 'mounting' to 'stuffing' precisely because the modern method builds anatomy rather than filling a bag of skin.
- Papier-mâché process
- The museum method of building a hollow, light, exactly measured body: sculpt the animal in clay, take a plaster mould, and laminate paper and glue inside it. Standard practice at American museums from the 1890s until foam.
- Relief carving / relief cutting
- Cutting shallow grooves into a manikin so the skin can be pressed down into muscle separations and vein lines, producing surface anatomy instead of a smooth silhouette.
- Wiring
- Running galvanised wire through the legs, neck, and tail of a small mount and anchoring it in the body form so the pose can be set and adjusted while the skin dries.
Finishing
- Bondo / body filler
- Two-part automotive filler adopted by late 20th-century taxidermists to model the seams, eye sockets, and nose pads of a finished mount before painting.
- Rosette
- The ring of hair around the base of a horn or antler. Preserving the rosette intact is a standard test of a competent head mount.
- Tumbling / drumming
- Rotating a tanned pelt in a drum of hardwood sawdust to absorb oil, soften the leather, and fluff the fur — the finishing step that gives a dressed fur its lustre.
Trade & Display
- Anthropomorphic taxidermy
- Mounted animals dressed and posed in human attitudes — kittens at a tea party, boxing squirrels. A Victorian novelty popularised by Walter Potter and imitated widely in British and American shops.
- Diorama (habitat group)
- A mounted group set in a reconstructed landscape with painted background, modelled foreground, and accessioned plants. The habitat group turned taxidermy from cabinet specimen into narrative exhibit.
- Shikar trophy
- A hunting trophy from the Indian subcontinent — tiger, leopard, gaur, sambar — prepared for the shikar (hunt) trade. The Van Ingen workshops in Mysore built an industry on preserving and shipping them.
Read the sources
Every term here comes out of the manuals, catalogs, and trade papers preserved in the archive. Follow the vocabulary back to the volumes that defined it.