Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

to places such as Spain, Africa, and Argentina, so that he could demonstrate how to properly skin their kills. "In the taxidermy trade, I've never worked for anyone else except the Smithsonian," he said.

In twenty-nine years as a taxidermist, his sole ambition has been to preserve animals—exactly. "I'm not going to change nature," he says. "We don't know anything about life systems, but [we do know] everything that supports the musculature."

Matthews, himself a championship taxidermist, holds competitions in high regard because they provide standards in an otherwise unregulated field. Whereas most European taxidermists must pass a practical exam and serve as an apprentice before they can work commercially, in the United States generally all a taxidermist has to do is pay a nominal fee to the state fish and wildlife department and show someone there a mount or two. That said, no title in the taxidermy world ranked higher than lead taxidermist at the Smithsonian Institution.

Matthews's salary was $58,000, half of what he says the same work would have brought in commercially. Still, the honor far eclipsed the money. "It's a prestigious job and a legacy. A commercial taxidermist doesn't have the time for details, but a museum taxidermist should be as flawless as possible. The anatomy should be perfect; all the nasal and inner ear detail, all the idiosyncrasies should be as close to perfect and anatomically accurate as possible," he said. "I just spent a week and a half on the koala bear. I'd never spend that much time on a commercial mount."

The gigantic workshop was sparkling clean, with super-high ceilings lit with long fluorescent tubes. Long worktables spread with specialized equipment and anatomy books were equipped with ventilation hoods for sucking out toxic fumes given off by the Bondo and lacquer the taxidermists used. But most prominent were the animals. Strikingly beautiful, some mounts were more than one hundred years old; others were rare and exotic endangered species, hardly any examples of which still exist in the wild. They leaped and yawned, stretched and drooled, nursed their young and showed off their defining features. The towering Russian brown bear on hind legs looked as if it remembered how it got here and wanted revenge. The arched-backed clouded leopard flaunted its sharp canines and papillae-studded tongue—weapons it used to devour its mates, thereby ensuring its status as the most endangered wild cat. Matthews shined a flashlight into its custom-made eyes; they gleamed like roadside reflectors.

The room radiated the energy of 274 animals representing four continents telling the story of evolution. The smallest, the feathertail glider (an extremely rare marsupial from Australia), had already been skinned (by Matthews, in front of research scientists) and mounted. The largest, the fifteen-foot reticulated giraffe (now a pile of foam parts and a frozen pelt), had to be assembled on-site in Washington, the only way the giraffe would fit through the door.

Matthews led me deeper into the lab, introducing me to the mounts as if they were childhood friends. I envied his ability to feel so deeply for each species. We passed the lowland gorilla (knuckle-walking), the brush-tailed porcupine, the gray fox, and the South American tayra. Three tree kangaroos were frozen in flight, hopping across the cement floor. They made me want to hop, too.

Matthews knew every inch of the lab. In 1997, when the museum had received a $20 million donation from California real estate developer Kenneth E. Behring for the hall, Matthews had been appointed lead taxidermist. It was an immense responsibility to help collect, refurbish, and mount 274 animals in three years, especially when you consider that the Akeley Hall of African Mammals took twenty-five years to create (and killed Akeley).

This year the Smithsonian's secretary, Lawrence M. Small, wasn't a paleontologist or an astrophysicist, but a former Citicorp banker with no museum or academic experience. (Small resigned in 2007 after an audit showed that he had spent museum money on chauffeured cars, private jets, posh hotels, and other luxuries.) When Small took the job, he promised to "modernize everything of consequence," a dubious concept to research scientists and curators (literally, guardians of the collection), who feared that the Mall was becoming a mall. Soon every exhibit bore a logo: the Fujifilm Giant Panda Habitat; the O. Orkin Insect Zoo; the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater at the National Air and Space Museum; and, most perplexing of all, a museum visitors' guide sponsored by Philips Petroleum with a back-page ad promoting oil drilling in Alaska.

Outside funding is essential at most museums, even this one, which gets 70 percent of its annual budget from the U.S. government. Museums have always operated this way. Carl Akeley and Roy Chapman Andrews had to entice rich industrialists and other patrons to fund their expeditions, too. At the Smithsonian, however, researchers and curators feared that the private money would affect content, resulting in exhibits that are "dumbed down." In 2001, for instance, thirty-six curators at the National Museum of American History signed a protest memo saying, "Secretary Small has obligated the museum to relationships with private individuals that breach established standards of museum practice and professional ethics."

Kenneth Behring had given more money to the Smithsonian than anyone in the museum's history. When he gave Natural History the $20 million, followed three years later by $80 million for American History, the museum was finally able to renovate its gorgeous Beaux Arts building (1910), which housed two mammal halls, World of Mammals and North American Mammals, with their habitat dioramas, and Life in the Sea, with its great blue whale.

One reason the museum wanted the new hall was because it believed people were no longer aware that they were mammals; indeed, the museum thought, people didn't consider themselves animals at all. As the exhibition team hired outside architects and designers, it began to establish what the new hall would be about (210 years of mammal evolution), who the intended audience would be (families with children under age ten, 60 percent of its demographic), and what story to tell