I've been involved in natural history illustration for a number of years, and a recent visit to the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH has re-awakened my boyhood interest in taxidermy and habitat dioramas.
In going through the major supply catalogs and the general literature, though, I've had a hard time finding solid information on the longevity of materials. Most good illustration/fine arts catalogs provide information on the relative lightfastness of the pigments used in the various paints they sell, for example. I've yet to find information like that for the paints in the taxidermy catalogs I've seen. There are also a number of books in the world of painting that provide information on how long various types of media (i.e. different papers and the like) will last. I haven't come across anything similar for all the modeling and casting compounds, etc. in taxidermy.
I can only conclude that either:
1. Nobody knows, or they don't care.
2. There are standard references I just haven't been able to find, or it's just common knowledge.
3. Manufacturers would never consider using anything that wouldn't be considered of archival quality. Ha ha.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Carl Ramm
Return to Habitat and Exhibit Category Menu
Six months is generally considered the shelf life of chemicals. Some will last longer but then why waste your money stock piling. With todays fast transit systems, we get most chemicals within a week. This has also helped unlike years ago when it would take weeks for items to reach you.
The supply houses have a very fast turn on the items they stock, again leading to the fact we nolonger need to stock pile. Unlike many of our Grandparents that grew up in the depression.
Those are really excellent questions, Carl. In the case of the urethane foams that make up most of the taxidermy mannikins today, I don't know how long they will actually last before they break down. Inside the mount they are fairly well protected from UV rays, but I have never heard a long term projection as to their "life" expectancy.
I would think that the organic parts of the mount would break down before the plastics, though.
In a controlled museum environment that was designed to protect the organic materials from UV and oxygen, etc., the plastics would also be protected. I think they could last for centuries.
The pigments in taxidermy paints are the same as in other paints, so the same rules would apply.
An interesting point is that a lot of these materials are so new that there hasn't been time to see if they last or not. Still, they would probably be like newspaper and last forever if they were buried in a landfill.
I also meant to add that Stephen Rogers might know about this subject. Hopefully he will check in and see this post.
Nancy M.
....that the lifespan of the paints is always more than that of the feathers/hair of the mount. If photosensitivity is a problem, deer hair will always turn yellow and feathers will bleach in the sun well before the paints do. Carl, for some reason you seem intent on confusing taxidermists with artists. In the lexicon of vocations, they differ greatly and I can only consider one of three things about you:
1. You didn't know or didn't care
2. You were looking under da Vinci instead of Ackley
3. Manufactures cater to the artists and not the medium.
Any Suggestions?
As in most things, there is never enough money to go around or enough trained people to do the necessary research. Taxidermists and Conservators rarely interact and often even in larger Museums the conservator has little influence on the materials employed by the taxidermist to mount exhibit materials.
There are message lists and societies where you can investigate research that has been conducted on natural history materials. The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Specimens has a webcite that gives abstracts of journal contents, some which relate to your quest for information. The society has a membership that includes at least 4 taxidermists that I am aware of but none of these has published any papers I am aware of.
Also there is a Conservation archive list at:
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/ I searched much of the archives at one time for papers pertaining to taxidermy materials and found only a paultry amount of information.
The trouble, as I am sure you are quite aware, is that there is really no training in natural history conservation per se. Almost all conservators charged with specimen care are educated in conservation of art materials or classic archaeological material. There are perhaps 4-6 purely natural history conservators who are sufficiently informed enough to even make reccommendations of interactions of materials with preserved organic taxidermy mounts - and mostly they would always tell you what you SHOULDN"T use, not what you should.
The only way to really tell longevity of materials used would be documenting the items used in creatings an exhibit and watching their condition through the decades to come. Often there is insufficient data recorded at the time of preparation, as well as poor records of the conditions the items were subjected to. The Akeley hall was officially opened in 1931 after about 15 concentrated years of effort. Akeley, whom it was named for, was convinced to leave the Field Museum and began the hall fully intending to name it for Teddy Roosevelt, but its name was changed to reflect the dedication he had put into it until his untimely death. The documentation of the materials used is not entirely sufficient to say with certainty what materials were used, and the temperatures that the specimens were subjected to over the years surely influenced their longevity - especially without air conditioning or humidity control.
Current conditions at Museums are much better than even twenty years ago (though WE still have numerous un-air-conditioned exhibit halls where summer temperature reach 95 degrees and humidity fluctuates from a winter low of 20 to a summer high of perhaps 70 percent.
Many of the materials you inquire about are constantly changing - either because there is a shift in the general industry or in the exact materials of the material itself - for example, hide paste that once utilized phenol now can't because of government regulation. There is no way for conservators to keep up with the incoming innovations in molding, casting, glueing, and mounting materials.
The only way to be sure you have safe materials that will last 100 years is to use the exact materials AS 100 years ago. Luckilly with the industrial revolution in the latter 19th century there was a large number of taxidermy textbooks published with methods used and these can present the basis for continued study should anyone want to delve into the matter.
I probably didn't answer your specific question, but this answer is not in the Archives - any archives I am aware of.
Thanks for some very useful thoughts and leads, which I will put to use.
A few thoughts on paints and pigments: It is true that a pigment will outlast the natural pigments of an animal's coat--if (and it's a big if) the pigment is a lightfast pigment, i.e. one that is known to last for centuries or more. The problem is, of course, that there is a wide range of lightfastness in paint pigments. Some (usually known as fugitive) will last for only a few weeks while others will last for centuries with most falling somewhere in the middle.
Almost always, when a manufacturer supplies a wide range of colors to a line of paints, some of the pigments are fugitive. This isn't necessarily bad if it is made clear, since there are of course some uses where you only need the color to last for a little while. And as long as the name of the paint matches the stabdard name of the pigment, you can always look it up in a reference if there isn't a durability rating given. The problem is when the name of the paint doesn't let you know what the name of the pigment(s) in use are and no rating is given. It may hold its color for weeks or for centuries, who knows?
If it's not a concern then it's not a concern, but I would never simply expect a paint's color to be durable. There are just far too many fugitive pigments in general use by manufacturers to just count on it not fading. Maybe I'm just naive or overly idealistic, but be I the taxidermist or the client I would want a mount with colors that will last.
I shouldn't have ended my last post on what might have seemed like an overly negative note. I'm sure most taxidermists and clients do want colors that last; I'm just surprised that suppliers don't give information about lightfastness of taxidermy paints (or that it's there and I'm not finding it).
Thanks again for some very useful information and some avenues of research I hadn't thought of. I'm really glad to know this resource is here.
The most recent thorough book dealing with the field is:
Carter, David and Annette K. Walker 1999. Car & Conservation of Natural History Collections. Butterworth Heinemann. xxii + 226 pp.
The book gives good summaries of the present knowledge on conservation of Natural History Objects. The Chapter on Vertebrates is by Dick Hendry from Scotland who consulted with many people and surveyed the literature thoroughly for the 36 pages he wrote.
Thanks for the book citation. I'll try today to see if the local library can get a copy on ILL. If not I'll see if I can't find one to buy, sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.
Stephen, do you know what the URL for The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Specimens is? I haven't been able to find it.