>

When Victorian taxidermists received a strange creature with heavy folds of grooved skin, they thought all those wrinkles needed to be smoothed out. And so the Horniman Museum’s walrus, as with so many taxidermy works made by those who hadn’t yet glimpsed the dead animal in its living state, became its own sort of walrus — heavily overstuffed until he seems about to burst, and not a wrinkle over his taut skin. - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/horniman-museum-walrus-comes-home

(Photo by TomNatt: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomnatt/3733416334)

#taxidermy #animals