The ‘Father of Modern Taxidermy’ wrestled leopards and worked for P.T. Barnum

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Before Carl Akeley came along, natural history museums were somewhat sedate affairs. 

“You would have, let’s say, the birds of a certain region, all lined up in stiff poses,” says Mark Alvey, who recently retired as a researcher for Chicago’s Field Museum. This sort of taxidermy was purely practical, he explains. “It was for education, so that you could see their anatomy and everything, but it was kind of dull.”

This was in the late 19th century, a time when, in the United States at least, the study of nature was becoming more accessible. While natural history was once the hobby of learned gentlemen with the money and leisure to maintain private collections, new public museums let anyone indulge their scientific curiosity. People flocked to institutions like the Field Museum (which opened in 1894), the Smithsonian (1855), and the American Museum of Natural History in New York (1871). 

In an era before easy international travel, TV documentaries, or even widespread color photography, Americans were thrilled to see artifacts from far-flung cultures and the ancient human past alongside gems, fossils, and especially animal specimens from around the world, up close and personal.

At first, even stilted taxidermy drew crowds—after all, few Americans had seen, say, a lion or tiger, and they could forgive a little stiffness. But as taxidermy evolved into an art, complete with painted backdrops and dramatic poses, it became a true sensation. And much of that evolution can be credited to Carl Akeley, the so-called “Father of Modern Taxidermy.”

Carl Akeley’s early fascination with taxidermy

Born on a farm in Upstate New York in 1869, Akeley became interested in taxidermy at 12 years old, when he visited an exhibition of 50 preserved small mammals and birds in nearby Rochester. He was soon stuffing specimens at home, including his cousin’s late parakeet, a mount the bird’s bereaved owner apparently found delightful.

At 18, Akeley turned pro, apprenticing at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, a commercial supplier of preserved specimens for research, education, and public displays. His big break came in 1884 when he and his mentor were commissioned to mount circus impresario P.T. Barnum’s famous elephant, Jumbo (the beast had recently perished in a railway accident). 

Akeley would go on to work for the Milwaukee Public Museum before Chicago’s Field Museum hired him as chief taxidermist in 1896 at the age of 27. By the time he left in 1909 to take a job at the American Museum of Natural History, he had revolutionized the field.

How Akeley transformed taxidermy forever

By the time Akeley arrived on the scene, many curators were already agitating for more interesting taxidermy, but “Akeley took that and ran with it,” says Alvey, who is currently collaborating with a Field Museum colleague on a biography. “He surpassed everyone in his artfulness and the lifelike poses of his animals.”

In Chicago, Alvey created not only specimens in lifelike poses, with expressive features, but also entire groups of animals, arranged as if frozen in a dramatic moment, complete with background paintings and props. 

His advances were not only artistic but also technical. He dismissed older ways of mounting animals as little different from the “upholsterer’s method”—essentially, stuffing skins as one would a cheap sofa. Instead, he perfected interior infrastructure, building lightweight “mannequins” out of papier mâché on wire mesh, based on measurements from the field and photographs of the animal in its environment. He sculpted realistic muscles out of plaster and clay and sewed skins over them using invisible seams. The idea was to create a mount that looked not only lifelike but alive.

“Certainly he is the world’s greatest taxidermist, for it was he who raised the mounting of animal specimens for exhibition to the level of the arts,” wrote Popular Science contributor Hawthorne Daniel in 1923.

Among his masterpieces for the Field Museum was “Four Seasons of the Virginia Deer,” which showed white-tailed deer in their natural habitat over the course of a year. Though common now, at the time deer populations were crashing after centuries of overhunting. Few museum visitors at the time had likely seen one.

“They were kind of a sensation,” Alvery says, of the four dioramas, which featured wax leaves and snow made out of sugar and arsenic. “Teddy Roosevelt came to the museum specifically to see them before they were finished. He was a taxidermy buff.”

How hunting went hand-and-hand with conservation

Like Roosevelt, Akeley’s love of taxidermy was also deeply connected to passions for hunting and for conservation—a contradiction which might raise eyebrows today, but which was par for the course in the early 20th century. 

He traveled to Africa with his first wife, Delia Akeley, and second wife, Mary Jobe Akeley, to kill animals for use in museum exhibitions. (Both wives were also respected explorers and researchers in their own rights, in addition to collaborating on hunts and dioramas.) 

While Akeley was described by contemporaries as “mild-mannered,” he clearly also had a flair for the dramatic, especially when it came to seeking out danger and recounting his own exploits. (The no-doubt crucial assistance of local guides was, typically of the period, glossed over in these tales.) Among Akeley’s famous exploits in Africa were a near-death experience with a charging elephant and a battle with a leopard, which he allegedly killed with his bare hands. 

“[K]nowing Carl Akeley as I do, knowing of his record of tremendous achievement, I can understand why it was that the leopard, locked in death grip with this man, met more than his match,” Hawthorne Daniel, the Popular Science journalist, later marveled. 

 Such risk-taking did eventually catch up with him, however. Akeley died in 1926 in the Congo, of dysentery. But unlike the man himself, his work would live on for the museum-goers that still flock to see it. 

In the years since, technology has opened up new possibilities for animal encounters, ranging from safari trips to Africa—now accessible even to the middle class vacationer—to virtual reality documentaries, viewed safely from the living room couch. But there’s still something about taxidermy that keeps us coming back, and notably many of Akeley’s displays retain pride of place, especially at the Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History.

“You can kind of close everything off and imagine yourself in that space,” Alvey says, describing Akeley’s immersive dioramas. “They’re still engaging. They’re still fascinating. They still work.”

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