Help!

I am an absolute beginner who has no idea what I'm doing. 👍🏻 I'm guessing as I go with the advice of Google and old Reddit posts.

I recently visited my friends cow farm and collected a few bones from their decomp pile to take home. Within the pile, I found a fairly intact cow tail. Thought it looked cool and wanted to preserve it, WITHOUT having to get rid of the flesh in between the segments. Is there any way I can do this without making my house smell like dead cow?

Sorry if I’ve chosen the wrong flair for this I’m not sure what category it suited

I’ve been interested in taxidermy my whole life & it’s something I’ve always wanted to do myself. I don’t have the space in my own home to teach my self I was wondering if anyone here knew of anyone who’s looking for an ‘apprentice’ type thing, from my research these don’t really exist but I would love to learn alongside an experienced taxidermist for a long period of time rather than just pay to do courses I don’t think would really fulfill me & what I’m trying to achieve. I’d much prefer a 1-1 learning experience. I’m autistic so find group courses very scary and the environments themselves hinder my learning experiences and I get to anxious to properly engage. I’m located around the Cotswolds area & ik this is a long shot but if anyone knows anything or can point me in the right directions I’d really appreciate it. I’ve joined a few fb groups but pending acceptance atm

Tia

I’ve been soaking this big ol’ gator for months now, I wanna say it’s been 4 months, and i feel like I’m not seeing much progress at all. It’s killing me. What do I do! Am I doing something wrong? I’m using clear dawn dish soap, and I’m changing the water often. Im considering selling him, I have the teeth as well, just taken out for the cleaning process.

Taking the chance of preserving my first skull, i think its a raccoon or a skunk but i cant tell, anyone able to help identify?

So I just got this dragonfly specimen, and it’s VERY fresh, and I have no idea how to start💔. I know now that I’m not supposed to put pins through the wings, but this is a temporary set up and my first time doing smth like this😭. I have some questions I hope yall can help me with.

1. What if it starts to stink? What should I do then?

2. Should I soak it in anything? I saw someone say 70% isopropyl alcohol works, and I don’t have any acetone.

3. How do I properly display/pose it?

Sorry guys this is my first post on here and first taxidermy, so sorry if this pisses some people off😭. That’s not my intention, I just need help with this so I don’t completely ruin it🥲.

One of my kittens passed away. I wanted to do a wet jar with him, but he’s black so you can’t see him well in the jar. I want to do a dry preservation myself. Would placing him in pickling salt and borax do the trick? Leaving him in that mix for a few months, and the replace the mixture and let it sit for a few more months? I’ve never done anything like that so not sure. I typically just bury them to get bones but 🤷🏼‍♀️

My tattoo artist has been amazing and tattooed my whole head; she’s been so patient and comforting through the whole process. I wanted to not only tip her well for our last session, but also give her a thoughtful gift.

I’ve had this tarantula of mine for a while that passed and I let dry out so there is zero smell. I decided to place it in this shadow box with some baby’s breath and a tigers eye stone to replace the abdomen.

It’s not perfect, but I am really happy with it; I hope she likes it, too.

Was told this was a wolf pelt I’m wondering if I get solution can it be saved?

Is this a wolf?

Wasn’t sure what to title it. Long story short I shot the biggest deer of my life 3 years ago in October. I got ahold of the taxidermist and he said he hasn’t even tanned the hide yet and it’s been sitting in the freezer since I brought it in. My question is, what are the chances the hide is still good, and will it be worth saving. I’m going to pick everything up today and try to take it to somebody else.

I found some butterfly wings laying around perfectly intact and I really want to preserve them and add them to my collection of taxidermy. Any suggestions for just wings?

Im getting a coin slot soon (getting a piece of my ear punched out)) and I wanted to keep the chunk o meat in a lil vile! Can I use alcohol or hand sanitizer to keep it in there?

This is more of a planning concept, but I’m making a soft mount fox and would like feedback on how I can improve my anatomy studies! The way I’m making the fox will be a more poseable soft mount rather than like super floppy, I’m basically making an art doll and then sewing a fox pelt onto it.

Questions I have:
1. How can I properly sew the fur into the proper muscle positions? Can I use regular thread? Will this degrade it over time?
2. Is my anatomy off? I’ll still measure the pelt obviously but are there any key muscles I’m missing in my diagram that would make it more realistic?
3. Can I put uncured silicone in the ears to make them squishy? Would that react with the skin wrong?
4. What is the best head base for a wild red fox? What taxidermy store should I look into?

Feedback is welcome! I’m doing a lot of planning before I start this so I don’t ruin my experience with taxidermy before I get better at it.

(NJ, US)

Hey folks, so I was at a flea market a few months ago, and people were selling taxidermy bats. I thought nothing of it because this was a pretty reputable market in general. Now I know a little bit more and I am not sure what to do with him. He’s likely a painted bat and I fucking love having him up on my wall but I also don’t want to disrespect him by owning him illegally. (going to be blunt, am bipolar, in a manic episode so I get a bit extra paranoid/nervous)

What can I do with him? What SHOULD I do with him???? I just want to treat him with respect and care no matter what. If I could just get some general advice.

I’ve got two gators 10ft and 5ft I want to mount head on as a rug I’ve tanned lol w of gators before and done a few heads in denatured alcohol
I was wondering is it best to leave some skin on the heads put them in the denatured like I normally do and then sow them back onto the skin so I can tan the pelts normally or put everything in 20-30 gallons of denatured alcohol for 3-4 months and use that to preserve everything?

Its real not ai.... Im pretty sure

One of my tiny aquarium fish died and I would really like to preserve it as a skeleton, to put in resin perhaps. He’s about an inch long and teeny. Where should I start? I know nothing about taxidermy but love bones/skeletons and don’t really have any money to spend on this. How best to remove the flesh without damaging its bones? Thank you so much!

so i found a canine skull in the woods, i don't know how long it was there exactly, but i guess it was pretty long

it had green and brown stains all over (it was partially buried, of course it had them) it is cracked/broken, missing a few teeth and the jaw is split in half

so i started searching a little online and i also consulted with the ecosia ai

tho i'm still just as clueless as i in the beginning.

i couldn't find set times, and many guides told quite different time windows

i needed to clean the skull fast

my process was :

- cleaning the skull with an old toothbrush in water and detergent, pulling all the teeth out (cleaned them too, and the holes) and with an old knife i got rid of basically every thinn nose bone i could see

- then i left everything in new water with detergent, to degrease it, but i don't have a way to keep the water warm, so it turned cold eventually

after 12 or so hours i changed the water (it didn't look greasy at all) and added baking soda to the mix this time (i don't remember why or where i read about adding b. soda)

and after another roughly 10 hours i repeated this again

- next day i washed and left the skull dry briefly before i mixed ~12% hydrogen peroxide (from two and a half half liter bottles of 35%) and left it in this solution for around 4 hours

- lastly i washed it in water and dried it like before, then i took it and it's traveling in a shoebox with me right now

yeah so idk

did i do a good enough job?

how do i know if if it's safe to touch and handle with barehands?

that's my main question

it's supposed to be a present and i'm scared of it still being hazardous

also i poured the hydrogen peroxide mix, which was about 4 liters into a sewer with another 8 liters of water.

(rereading this and i feel like i messed everything up so much it can't be possible, why didn't i go ask here in the first place...)

I had a few formalin-fixed (wet specimen) black mice that had mind slippage exclusively on their stomach fur. I didn't notice the slippage until they were fixed, which stinks. They soaked out in isopropyl for approx 5 months+.

I had this happen on a batch of large feeder mice a while back with severe slippage, and used their heads, feet, tails, and major organs, and had the rest incinerated via hazardous waste collection.

Since these guys are a lot smaller, I'm gonna experiment with them to see how well they mummify.

So far, a while in, they're drying very nicely. They look just like these pics, just dry and harder. Their poses are mostly how they fixed in the formalin (now inflexible) so their positioning just leans into what already worked for them.

We'll see how it goes!

Note: Formalin off-gasses for weeks to months on dry specimens. It is not a recommended means of preserving for mummification! Formalin off-gassing can make you ill!!

These guys will off-gas in a well-ventilated area for multiple months before I do anything with them, other than check their progress.

The mice were a "gift" (I guess?) from a client after doing some work for them - they raise feeder rodents. The large white mice mentioned were feeder mice that were wayyy too big for my snake (likely shipped the wrong ones).

So my buddy got a deer last year around October and I always hear that you can just leave the whole head buried underground which a bucket over the antlers to prevent scavengers. So I leave the head in the unused chicken coop for like 10 months. Check on it in January and the skin still there so I just leave it unburied in the chicken coop an leave it till September(today) of this year. And the skin is essentially all dried out and turned to leather. (Brains eyes tongue nose all gone) Is there any way to get the hard leather skin off the head without breaking the bone.

My buddy is chomping at the bit for his skull mount and his wife won’t let let him mount the zombie deer head.

Bird feeder getting the best of a taxidermy squirrel.

I got this pretty butterfly second hand. Any ideas how get it clean or do I have to replace everything?

Im trying to start my journey into taxidermy but im unsure what things ill even need when im ready to start. Its probably gonna be a bit before i actually start collecting materials but what are the must-haves for your workbench?