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

L. C. Rookmaaker, P. Morris, I. E. Glenn, and P. J. Mundy in "The Ornithological Cabinet of Jean-Baptiste Bécoeur and the Secret of Arsenical Soap" ( Archives of Natural History, 2006).

William Hornaday's quote about jealous, narrow-minded taxidermists ran in Science on July 24, 1880.

John James Audubon's effort to animate bird skins with wires is from Audubon and His Journals, vol. 2 (Dover Publications, 1986).

Pat Morris's article on arsenic exposure and the life spans of Victorian taxidermists, "Stuffing for Longevity," was published in New Scientist in August 1982.

Stephen Quinn's Windows on Nature has wonderful mini-biographies of the AMNH'S diorama artists; this is where I read about James Perry Wilson and the first renovation of the Hall of Ocean Life. The rest is from David and Bruce Schwendeman and AMNH press releases.

Facts about the Biology of Birds renovation came from AMNH's employee newsletter, Grapevine (May/June 1983).

2. THE CHAMPIONS

Retired Milwaukee Public Museum taxidermist Floyd Easterman generously shared documents from his personal archive with me, including the SAT annual reports of 1881, 1882, and 1884 and William Hornaday's personal scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Mary Anne Andrei's fastidiously researched article "Breathing Life into Stuffed Animals: The Society of American Taxidermists, 1880–1885" (Collections: A Journal for Museum Archives Professionals, November 2004) was extremely illuminating, as was an interview I had with her by phone.

America's approach to taxidermy is described in Karen Wonders's Habitat Dioramas. This is where I learned about the tradition of American sportsmen such as Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club.

For panda information and information on Hsing-Hsing, see "China's Panda Ambassadors," http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4508873.stm; "Animal Info—Information on Endangered Mammals," http://animalinfo.org/; and the National Zoo's Web site, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/GiantPandas/default.cfm.

No one can describe A Fight in the Tree-Tops with more animation and wit than its creator, William Hornaday. I found his lively words in his memoir A Wild-Animal Round-up: Stories and Pictures from the Passing Show (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925) and in Andrei's article "Breathing Life into Stuffed Animals." Wonders's Habitat Dioramas, from which I got Hornaday's quote "I love nature..." from Two Years in the Jungle (1885), provided the context in which I could view Tree-Tops in its era.

William Hornaday's account of Ward's Natural Science Establishment, "The King of Museum-Builders" (Commercial Travelers Home Magazine, February 1896), is incredibly vivid. Likewise, Natural History's March-April 1927 issue has articles by famous Ward's grads such as Frederic A. Lucas and William Wheeler, who lovingly describe the place. The Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985) also has a section on Professor Henry Ward and his magnificent quarry.

3. THE MAN WHO HUNTED FOR SCIENCE

Sources on Carl Akeley, his African expeditions, and his taxidermy process come from many places, including primarily the AMNH archives (his personal papers, journal, telegrams, correspondence, press bulletins, and records, as well as those of his widow, Mary Jobe Akeley) and to a lesser extent the Explorers Club library in Manhattan. I also relied on the following works: Akeley's memoir In Brightest Africa (Doubleday, 1920; I used the 1923 edition); Carl Akeley's Africa, an account of the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition by Mary Jobe Akeley (Blue Ribbon Books, 1929; I used the 1932 edition); The Wilderness Lives Again by Mary Jobe Akeley (Dodd, Mead, 1940), which describes his step-by-step preservation process. Roy Chapman Andrews's essay "Akeley of Africa" (True, June 1952) provided thoughtful insight into the character of this complex man, as did Robert Rockwell's memoir My Way of Becoming a Hunter (Norton, 1855). Stephen Quinn's Windows on Nature contains images from the AMNH's archives and behind-the-scenes information on the making of African Hall. The May 1914 issue of the American Museum Journal (14, no. 5) is about Akeley, as are the essays "The Autobiography of a Taxidermist" ( Natural History, March-April 1927) and "Carl Akeley's Enduring Dream" by George R. Price (Reader's Digest, September 1959). The March-April 1927 issue of Natural History is devoted entirely to Akeley's legacy and contains glowing commemorative essays by his dearest friends and colleagues: Kermit Roosevelt, Baron de Carter de Marchienne, F. Trubbee Davison, George Sheerwood, Frederic Lucas, William Wheeler, and Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Of all the Akeley books and articles, none is as passionately researched and rendered as African Obsession: The Life and Legacy of Carl Akeley by Penelope Bodry-Sanders (Batax Museum Publishing, 1998). I relied on this book for specific details about his early life and career, his time at Ward's, and his Congo expeditions.

I attended the June 2004 elephant radiography press conference at the museum, where I interviewed the conservation team while they shot images of the elephants. The New York Times ran a piece on the elephant project on June 4, 2004.

The Roosevelt-Smithsonian expedition of 1909 is described in Karen Wonders's "Habitat Dioramas."

The alleged elephant substitution is from Bodry-Sanders's African Obsession.

I found descriptions of Ward's Natural Science Establishment in the aforementioned memoirs and books; in Hornaday's profile of Ward, "The King of Museum-Builders"; in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985); and in Robert Rockwell's memoir My Way of Becoming a Hunter.

"Zoological Collections in the Early British Museum—Documentation of the Collection" by Alwyne Wheeler ( Archives of Natural History, 1996) summarizes the British Museum's collections, sources, and importance. The origins and contents of famous AMNH collections (those of Prince Maximilian of Wied, P. T. Barnum, and Roy Chapman Andrews) are from two old AMNH guidebooks (1953, 1972) and from the New York Times obituary of paleontologist James Hall (August 9, 1894).

The Thomas Barbour expedition is from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985).

Peale's information is drawn from many sources, chiefly Charles Coleman Sellers's Mr. Peale's Museum (Norton, 1980) and from Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History.

The account of Roy Chapman Andrews's expedition is from Science Explorer: Roy Chapman Andrews by Jules Archer (Simon & Schuster, 1968).

Charles Waterton's quote is from the 1889 edition of his expedition memoir Wanderings in South America (Macmillan).

Taxidermists originally portrayed the dodo as looking like it had swallowed a Gouda cheese and the goblin shark as having a shovellike protuberance on