Hey.
We're gonna talk about some books that I read.
I get a lot of questions about, "Hey, Emily, what are you reading right now?"
and "How do you know all of this?"
and "Oh my god, you're really smart."
And thank you very much,
but I, uh, obviously didn't learn all of this information
materializing out of the air,
um, I had to read it.
So.
Let's go through a stack of books,
these are the books that I have read
to get the information for this channel
and I'll probably be referencing them in the future
and I encourage you all to pick them up
and read them and buy them and love them
if you think that they sound interesting.
This book is called
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of the Natural History Museum
and it's written by Stephen T. Asma
who was actually a philosopher,
he's a philosophy professor,
which is awesome.
This book is hilarious and awesome
and it details, you know,
why we stuff things
and how that kind of stuffing process is done.
This next book is one of my favorite books,
it is seriously one of the most informative things I've ever read in my life.
It is called Dry Storeroom No. 1:
The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum,
written by Richard Fortey
and when they talk about the Natural History Museum,
they're referring to THE Natural History Museum, that is in England.
Which is one of the oldest and largest and most diverse
natural history museums in the existence of the world.
And Richard Fortey's just plainly a genius.
So this book is obviously one that you wanna pick up and read
if you have questions about
what kind of departments are in natural history museums.
It talks about some plants and minerals and invertebrates and vertebrates
and birds and the kind of racist things that we don't have on display anymore
because they are racist.
This is Still life: Adventures in taxidermy
by Melissa Milgrom
and if I had to narrow down some of my top 10 favorite books ever,
this would probably be in the Top 5
because...
Just... judge a book by its cover.
This book is awesome.
It goes into detail about things like the World Taxidermy Championship
That's a thing.
And it's not like the racing... you know,
taxidermied animals around in a circle or something.
It's not like that. But it is like the Superbowl
of the world of taxidermy.
And I wanna go to it some day.
Pioneer naturalists:
The Discovery and Naming of North American Plants and Animals
by Howard Ensign Evans
and although this book is currently out of print,
it is one of the most informative things I've ever read in my life.
Because if you're wondering
who the Douglas fir is named after,
it talks about David Douglas in here.
He died after falling into a trap
that was set to capture a loose bull
because apparently he had been caught sleeping with a farmer's wife.
In Hawaii.
This is The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy
and it's written by Dave Madden.
This book starts off detailing a lot of the work by Carl Akeley
who was arguably the father of modern taxidermy today
and the one responsible for creating the animals
that go into the dioramas at the American Natural History Museum in New York
So this book has a lot of significance because it details who this person was
and how they got started
and things like...
That's about it.
I don't have a cover for this one.
This is Mr. Hornaday's War:
How a schhhhh
Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World.
This is written by Stefan Bechtel
and this is another one of my Top 10 favorite books in the world.
I kind of have a personal allegiance to William Temple Hornaday
who was kind of a controversial figure in the history of taxidermy
and zoology but nevertheless a very significant one.
We have some of his specimens in our collection today
including the group of American bison
that were procured from Montana in 1886
that later went on display at the National Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C.
and inevitably were the spark for the fire
that saved the American bison from inevitable extinction.
So Stefan Bechtel goes into great detail about Hornaday
and how he did that
and there is a little bit of a mention
about how he put a pygmy person from the Congo on display
in a zoo with primate exhibit in order to highlight evolution.
And that makes Hornaday not so cool
but remember, it was like 1913 and...
things were different?
This is The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing
written by Rachel Poliquin.
And this book, more than any of the other ones,
goes into greatest detail about
the history of taxidermy on a global scale.
This book also goes into great detail about Walter Potter,
who is one of my favorite characters from taxidermy history.
Walter Potter actually
made little dioramas using bunnies and kittens
doing anthropomorphic things,
like, he made a kitty tea party,
There's a tea party of taxidermied kittens,
about 20 of them, and some of them are playing croquet on the side.
And the rest of them are drinking tea.
He also did the kitten wedding
that has like 20 attendants and Rachel Poliquin talks about that in her book.
And a lot of other really fascinating things about taxidermy
and the history of animal preservation.
So, thank you, Rachel Poliquin,
you're super cool, we should hang out sometime.
So, if you guys really need something to read
and you wanna read about taxidermy
and you wanna learn things and you wanna gain some awesome superpowers,
I recommend checking out any one of these books
they're some of my favorites.
This has been an episode of the Brain Scoop,
my name is Emily, make sure you subscribe
and thanks for watching.
It still has brains on it.