harbour porpoise. any ideas?

Hi, I have just been asked to mount a harbour porpoise calf that stranded on the beach a couple of days ago. the guy who has the body is currently in the process of aquiring the relevent paper work so I have a little time, but I need to figure out exactly how to do it. I want to do a skin mount rarther than a repoduction but I have never seen one done before, so I don't actuly know how practical it is. the animal is quite young and is only about 4 feet long so the size is not a major issue, but it is just so diferent to anything else. I am guessing it is going to be somwhere between a seal and a fish, and I have done a seal before, however I have no experience with fish, so I am not realy sure about the tequneces. If anyone has any ideas then I am open to sugestions.

 

the fleshing I am not looking forward to! you can't simply slide the skin off the blubber like you can off the meat. you have to carve the thing out of the skin. The seal took me 5 hours to skin and another 3 days of scraping to get all the blubber off! funily enough you can actuly get forms for seals. I managed to find one last time. I seriosly doubt you can get one for a porpoise though. I am sure I will have to make my own. I will probably make a cast. that bit should be easy by comparison. the thing I am most concerned about is skining the fins. the dorsal fin and tail flukes are just cartalige, so I am hoping it will turn out similar to a large ear, but I can see it being more complicated than that. the pectoral fins contain bones, but being such an odd shape, I doubt I will be able to invert them. I will probably have to make cut on the underside and carve it out that way. the other thing is I have no idea what happens to cetacean skin when it dries. will it loose its colour? will it shrivle up? its pretty thick, even with out the blubber, so how well will it tan?

 

I still intend to try the skin mount, but what would be the easiest, (and cheapest if posable) way to do a repoduction? as I said before, I have no experience with mounting fish so I have never done one before. as for the paper work, I am in England so it may be a bit more relaxed over here, I don't know what your laws are like, but I work for a wildlife rehab centre, that also contains an education centre, and we already have paper work for another stranded porpoise that we picked up. that was an adult, and already half rotten so I am mounting the skeleton on that one, but that was not dificult to get the permition at all. they didn't realy seem to care.

 

obviosly I wont be touching it until I know it is all leagal, but as I said, it wasn't a problem last time, so I wouldn't expect there to be any problems this time either. I havn't actuly seen the guy recently so I am not sure how it is going. I guess I will have to wait and see what happens, if anything.