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

by way of prelude. "I want people to go ballistic, to feel they are going crazy, seeing something they can't believe is real." Then we entered the Holocene.

Past a wall covered with taxidermy awards, past shelves of reproduction prehistoric skulls, was a massive hulking form covered with plastic sheeting. "She's kind of suicide blond now," Ken said, peeling off the plastic sheets. He hadn't modeled its facial features yet, or set its large amber eyes, or cast its small ears. And the blond pelts that he had described the night before at dinner—now stitched together to form a new animal—were held onto the form with long upholstery pins. But it was 100 percent megaloceros, which is to say the most masculine stag imaginable. Back at the house, Ken had shown me a few photos. They didn't come close to conveying its imposing scale and grandeur: its huge chest, its colossal shoulders, its powerful hump.

"It's starting to look like a real animal now," he said, walking over to a sawhorse that held a roughly nine-foot rack. The antlers weren't real. They were a fiberglass model that Ken had had custom-cast for $3,500 at Prehistoric Animal Structures, a local company that makes fake dinosaurs. (Later, he bought another rack, a thirteen-footer, from Taylor Studios for $5,000. Eighty-five hundred dollars in antlers quickly depleted the Walkers' savings. Nonetheless, the one anatomical feature you can't sacrifice when making an Irish elk is antlers. The family would recover when he sold the elk, preferably to a natural history museum. His asking price: $75,000.)

"I'm not into antiquities. It doesn't do me any good if they look like antique antlers on top of a live elk," he said, lifting the nine-foot rack off the sawhorse and walking over to his imposing buck. When he held the antlers above the elk's head, I could sense the animal's magnificence. I could imagine it standing high above the grassy plains, its antlers radiating sunlight like a beacon.

Ken had a buck on his sweatshirt and another one on his baseball cap. He circled his elk, looking for flaws that the World Show judges would catch, such as exposed seams. When you sew three animal skins together, even longhaired bulls, imperfections will emerge. Each leg may have up to ten different hair patterns. As in fine tailoring, the hair separations must align, or you'll lose points. "To impress the judges, sometimes you have to help them decide if you should win, and craftsmanship and attention to detail is one way," he explained.

Ken is nearly six feet tall. The elk was three feet taller and about as hairy. Ken groomed the elk's neck mane, applying Dippity-Do to every strand. He combed its tail (deer have tails; elk have stubs) with a wire dog brush. "Kind of cool, huh? I've used one hundred twenty-five yards of fire-line [thread] in that. I've got to be out of my stinking mind!" he said, shaking his head and smiling.

Before he put on surgical gloves to texturize the antlers, he handed me stacks of reference. Then he spent the next two days describing how he would make an extinct animal so alive that "people who have studied these things their entire lives would believe that it is real."

This is how he did it. First, he had John Matthews, who was still employed by the Smithsonian at the time, measure their Irish elk skeleton for reference. If Ken used that diagram, unaltered, to make his own elk, it would be a template. Ken would never use a template that he hadn't drawn—even one derived from the Smithsonian specimen—because the articulations might fall short of his own exacting standards. Today most biologists say that museum-mounted skeletons are unnaturally erect to emphasize the species' size, and Ken agrees. "I'm really fussy about my articulations. A lot of times I don't agree with the way a skeleton is rearticulated, so I go to anatomy books to see where the scapulas are supposed to sit and how straight the legs should be to hold the weight of those animals. Obviously, an animal that weighs one thousand pounds isn't going to hold his legs half hunched, because it is too stressful. There are references to physics in the whole thing."

He had no carcass to cast or erode. He was working from the inside out: skeleton, muscles, skin, fur. He redrew the Smithsonian skeleton, bone by bone, onto plastic sheets, which he cut out and reassembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle. When he was done, he had a flat skeleton. But he still wasn't ready to carve the form.

Ken is a gifted sculptor. He can shape rippled muscles with unerring accuracy by eyeballing diagrams or flat pelts. To do this, however, Ken had to know how an Irish elk's muscles behaved in motion and at rest. Fossilized remains, skeletons, and DNA sequencing don't show an animal's soft parts—its musculature, fur patterns, and humps. In fact, because fatty tissue does not fossilize, the Irish elk's hump wasn't officially confirmed until Stephen Jay Gould's study. He also needed to know how the animal behaved and sounded. But that data must be obtained by observation. How could he get it?

Fueled by a fierce curiosity, Ken posed the same questions asked by people such as Gould and the famous nineteenth-century British anatomist Sir Richard Owen: What kind of adaptations would enable an animal with a five-pound skull to support one-hundred-pound antlers? (Answer: incredibly powerful neck vertebrae and large muscles and ligaments.) What kind of form would a creature with massive dorsal spines (the third, fourth, and fifth spines are each a foot long) have? (Answer: a broadly raised area at the shoulders.) And so on.

For clues, he studied Paleolithic cave art: seven caves throughout Europe, particularly the Chauvet and Cougnac caves in France, whose megaloceros paintings are considered most accurate. Ken was collaborating with prehistoric humans, the first animal artists. "It's like comparing the Bible to yesterday's newspapers," he explains.

To someone who isn't a paleoarchaeologist or a taxidermist or