Taxidermy Touchup: How to Restore a Natural History Museum

Nobody wants a blonde bison.

Okay, the American Museum of Natural History?s problem wasn?t quite that bad. But according to Ross MacPhee, a curator and former chairman of the department of mammalogy at the museum, the mammal specimens had became a faded version of their former selves. Back in 1942, when the North American mammals wing opened at AMNH, it used lights that shone partly in the UV spectrum, MacPhee says, and UV is destructive to the color in the fur of the taxidermied animals. "The lights basically burnt the pigments out of the fur," he said. For example, here's what the bison looked like before restoration; compare it to the restored version seen above.

Bringing 70-year-old taxidermy back to its original state was just one of the challenges for the museum during its three-year, $40 million renovation project that culminated this month, when the AMNH?s memorial to President Theodore Roosevelt and the adjoining Hall of North American Mammals reopens to the public. PM was on hand last week to get an early look at what it takes to save a beloved museum exhibit.

The museum?s majestic mountain lions, whitetail deer, and caribou were the work of master craftsmen of the 1930s; refurbishing them fell to George Dante of Wildlife Preservations. First step: Develop a new pigment that was UV-stable and wasn?t permanent like paint. Dante developed his own method, a dye dissolved in a solvent, to solve the problem, but he then faced two more: How to apply it, and how to know what the animal should look like.

Airbrushing turned out to be the solution to the first issue. Dante says you can apply layer upon layer until you reach the hue and saturation you?re looking for. But to get a guide for the final product, he had to dive deep into the museum?s collection?to animals collected long ago that had kept their original coloring because they were not lit up and displayed publicly.

Completing the process was agonizingly drawn-out labor, too. Dante told PM he hand-painted every rosette (those spots on the fur of the jaguar seen above) until it looked right. "This method will now set the pattern for museum restoration," he says.

But the animals themselves aren?t the whole story. Part of the allure of a day at the history museum is seeing the mammals posed in gorgeous dioramas that represent their native habitat. MacPhee knows some people see a diorama as a relic. ("This is so terribly old-hat," he says in imitation, "this is my dad?s natural history museum.") However, he says, these decades-old encapsulations of the wild still allow visitors to look deeper into a scene than they could with a Discovery Channel documentary. And updating them allows the museum to stay up to speed with science.

For instance, he says, take the battling Alaska moose clearly jostling for the favor of the female who stands off to the side. In the decades since this setup was created, MacPhee says, scientists learned that she is no mere passive observer. If the female is displeased with both combatants, she utters a low-pitched moan that tells other males in the area to come take their chances. During the three-year restoration, MacPhee says, the museum updated the written information next to the diorama to include this new detail.

Even more minute changes came as part of the restoration. MacPhee says a visiting botanist noticed that the grass in the bison diorama, meant to depict the prairie of the 1800s, included an invasive grass that didn?t reach the area until the early 1900s. So it was removed, and replaced with proper native grasses.

And then there was the man of the hour. AMNH president Ellen Futter described Teddy Roosevelt as our conservation president, describing how the musuem?s charter was signed in his boyhood home and how T.R. eventually donated bird?s eggs, red squirrels, and other specimens. As his memorial reopened, Futter and other guests revealed the new life-size statue of Roosevelt, donned in the garb he would have worn to camp in the American West.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/taxidermy-touchup-how-to-restore-a-natural-history-museum-14295830?src=rss

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