Science: Do-lt-Yourself Taxidermy

"It's getting harder and harder to find a good taxidermist these days," says John Anglim, chief of exhibits at Washington's Smithsonian Institution. "Young people just don't go into this field any more." For the Smithsonian—which normally employs six taxidermists—and for other U.S. museums there is good news: an inexpensive, do-it-yourself process that may make the taxidermist's knife and needle as obso lete as a black snake's cast-off skin.

Responsible for the method is Dr. Harold T. Meryman of the Naval Medical Research Institute at Bethesda, Md., who stumbled onto the new-type taxidermy after a peanut butter-baited mousetrap at his home snared an unsuspecting cardinal. "I felt so bad about it," says Meryman, "that I decided I ought to give the bird a place in posterity." No taxidermist. Biophysicist Meryman, 39, tried an experiment. Posing the cardinal carefully, he first froze its joints into position with liquid nitrogen, then popped the bird into his kitchen freezer. When the moisture in the bird's body had turned to ice, Meryman used a vacuum pump and a chemical desiccant to remove the water in the form of vapor from the frozen body. The result: a thoroughly dehydrated but intact specimen suitable for display.

Meryman's office now looks like a wildlife refuge. A red fox poses hungrily on a bookcase. A black crow, wings outstretched, sits on a windowsill. Brightly colored small birds perch on pencil tops, and a brown bat swings malevolently from the ceiling, suspended by a nearly invisible wire. All look amazingly lifelike, preserved by Meryman's "freeze-dry" process and apparently able to stay in good condition indefinitely. The fox was shot by Meryman when it invaded his hen house. "He accounted for 27 hens," says Meryman, "before I freeze-dried him." The other specimens were collected along the shoulders of busy Southern highways. Says Meryman: "I'm always looking for well-preserved traffic casualties."

The freeze-dry technique is not new; it has commonly been used to preserve water-soluble drugs and blood plasma. But Meryman was first to apply it to taxidermy, and he has accumulated abundant data on the drying time of various animals. Small insects take only 24 hours to freeze-dry. A garter snake needs eight days, and a red squirrel requires four to six weeks in the vacuum chamber. From the scientist's point of view, freeze-drying has one big advantage over standard commercial taxidermy: the animals' internal organs remain intact, can be reconstituted for study or dissection simply by restoring their water.

Meryman has been retained as a Smithsonian consultant, is in Europe now to lecture on freeze-drying. In the meantime, he is looking for new applications of the freeze-dry technique. One possibility: embalming. "What I really need," says Meryman, "is volunteers."