Only a handful of pioneers in Germany, France, England, and Sweden preserved animals and birds with any liveliness, and those who did tended to favor combative tigers and camel-riding Arabs mauled by lions. Although these sensational displays riveted crowds at world's fairs and expos, they failed to show how an animal truly behaves in the wild. This would eventually change when American and Swedish museums embraced public education in the form of grand public displays (birds followed by mammals). But when Akeley arrived at Ward's, taxidermy was still amateurish, either too dead or too alive.
Fueled by a restless ambition, Akeley left Ward's in 1887 to prove that taxidermy could be scientifically sound, technically ingenious, and evocatively beautiful, and that he—"nothing but a taxidermist"—could be a true artist. His goal was to revolutionize taxidermy by approaching it as a sculptor, and after thirty years of tireless experimentation, he did just that. Instead of stuffing a skin full of rags and bones, he studied anatomy, replicating every muscle in clay. Eventually, he devised a method for stretching the animal's skin over a plaster replica of its body that was so finely contoured no one could deny that taxidermy was art. His manikins were so strong, lightweight, and accurate that museums such as the Smithsonian use a variation of his method today. In 1889, Akeley created the first habitat diorama in America: muskrats for the Milwaukee Public Museum, which still has it on display.
It was the grand era of the scientific field expedition. Museums no longer relied only on private collectors and places like Ward's for their specimens. They sent their own teams of explorers, naturalists, and taxidermists to exotic lands, where they collected an astounding number of specimens. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Americans led the pack. These hair-raising journeys involved not only the thrill of the hunt but also the less celebrated task of skinning the animals and curing thousands of exotic pelts in primitive conditions, then shipping them back to the museum across oceans and deserts in hermetically sealed "chop boxes" (boxes used to transport food on safaris). When the precious skins arrived at the museum, taxidermists spent years preserving them using rudimentary tools, limited scientific knowledge, and no refrigeration.
In 1887, the AMNH sent an expedition to Montana's badlands in search of bison. It was the first of more than one thousand such collecting trips sponsored by this museum alone. In 1931, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology sent a six-man team to Australia. "We shall hope for the specimens of the kangaroo, the wombat, the Tasmanian devil, and the Tasmanian wolf," wrote museum director Thomas Barbour. They returned to Cambridge with more than one hundred mammals and thousands of insects.
Some expeditions were much less fortunate. Around 1900, Carl von Hagen, a German butterfly collector, went to Papua New Guinea to collect butterflies. After he netted an exceptionally beautiful Ornithoptera paradisea, he himself was captured and eaten by cannibals. Ironically, his 110-year-old winged trophy survived and now resides at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, its magnificent day-glo green and black wings as vibrant as ever.
In 1916, an expedition headed by Roy Chapman Andrews crossed southern China on horseback in search of dinosaur fossils and, according to one account, the elusive "blue tiger" and other new species. They never found the mysterious tiger but managed to send home more than three thousand zoological specimens (about two thousand mammals and mammal skeletons, eight hundred birds, and two hundred reptiles), two-thirds of which had never been seen before in the United States.
Taxidermists who collected animals for museums considered themselves conservationists, not trophy hunters, even though their expeditions were funded primarily by wealthy patrons who wanted to hunt for big game—especially with Akeley. Today you can see their quarry (and their names) in the AMNH's Hall of North American Mammals and other grand galleries. Although Akeley did discard the occasional elephant (uneven tusks; facial tumors), Cape buffalo (scorched pelt), and diseased hyena, he claimed that he never shot for sport or for profit. That's why he could look you in the eye from under his pith helmet, a smoking 475 Springfield rifle in his hands, and say, "As a naturalist interested in preserving African wildlife, I was glad to do anything that might make killing animals less attractive."
Animals were, after all, his dearest friends, and, like most taxidermists, he viewed them anthropomorphically. He considered elephants chivalrous, lions regal and fearless, kudu stylish and graceful, hippos and rhinos stupid and blundering, ostriches wary and clever, and buffalo vigilant and vindictive. The only animal he ever truly disliked was that "sneaky carrion eater" the leopard. In the shy, gentle gorilla, he found his "kin"—a species that "desired to be loved."
The place that enchanted him most was Africa, where he led five scientific field expeditions. He was seized with the idea of re-creating Africa in America on his first expedition for the Field Museum in 1896, but the notion didn't fully take hold until 1909, when the AMNH sent him back to collect elephants for it. (He would spend the next seventeen years at the museum, but he refused to take a position on staff, instead preferring to be paid in stipends.) By then, Africa had changed. It was no longer pristine and wild but marred by civilization. Hunting safaris had become big business, led in vehicles, not on foot. Forests that had once teemed with exotic birds and beasts were now, taxidermically speaking, picked over, and it took Akeley two years to find four elephants splendid enough to represent the largest land mammal on earth.
One day Akeley was on Mount Kenya, taking photographic reference of the elephants' habitat, when he startled an old bull
