Anyone here have any taxidermy experience?

rosenkrieger · Anyone here have any taxidermy experience?

Since I got a small colony of dermestid beetles from Ogershok (thank you so much, btw), I have been itching to try them out. I have a few deceased pet mice in my freezer that I would like to skin and preserve the pelts, and clean and mount the skeleton in a block of resin. I would just bury them, but it's going to be a while before I'm settled into my own house, so I'd like to preserve them some other way.

Now, my main question is this. How do you go about drying the skins out and preserving them to be used for display or to make something out of them?

ftorres

Hello Chase,
I am not sure if this will work for furry skins, but when I was thought how to skin a snake and preserve the skin.

The guy who showed me was a shoe maker. He told me to cover the underside of the skin with lots of grain salt and then roll it around a soda can.

I did it and the skin took a couple weeks to dry out. The salt keep the skin somewhat flexible.

you might want to try the same way and see the results.

good luck

francisco

PD you can also visit here
http://www.taxidermy.net/forum/index.php/topic,88265.0.html

or here

http://www.taxidermy.net/forum/index.php

rosenkrieger

Thanks for the links. One of the skins I'm going to be doing is a snake. It's a 5-6 foot gopher snake, so I think I might need something bigger than a soda can. haha

ftorres

Hello Chase,
I think it will work.
I used a coke can and the snake was a rat snake at least 6-7' long.
I don't have any pics or the skin as this was back when I lived in Mexico.

You can also try a Monter drink can or something similar in size.

francisco

rosenkrieger

Thanks. I'll give it a try. I joined that forum over there, too, so I'll post my questions there as well.

ogershok

I actually used to do taxidermy as a hobby. If you don't need the skin to be flexible you can preserve it with borax. (Twenty Mule Team Boraxo is fine) Just make sure you get all of the fat off of the skin. Rub the borax into the skin while it's still soft and just let it dry. You can pin the skin flat on a piece of cardboard, hair side down and then apply the borax. If you need it soft and leathery that's a lot harder.

rosenkrieger

I would prefer it soft and leathery. What does that entail?

Celeste

I've used the salt technique on deer hides, and it worked fine: salt them down and scrape off the salt, then re-salt them then scrape, etc.

But I tried salt on an albino corn snake skin many years ago, and it didn't work very well -- I wound up with a very thin, translucent, brittle skin. I'm thinking reptile skins need something different...