Carl Akeley

The trouble with being the man who killed a leopard by sticking his hand down its throat is that nobody wants to hear about anything else you did. Carl Akeley was an artist, photographer, inventor, conservationist, and the father of modern taxidermy. He was also, in 1896, on a ridge in Somalia, with eighty pounds of enraged cat wrapped around his right arm and no better idea than to push it deeper.

In less lurid chronicles, Akeley is celebrated as the man who first applied scientific rigor and a sculptor’s technique to the craft of stuffing animals for exposition. Akeley was among the first to place his specimens in realistic dioramas for the leading American museums of the day. He called these exhibitions “groups” and populated them with scores of animals he killed personally, with great efficiency and occasional bouts of self-doubt.

“While I have found but little enjoyment in shooting any kind of animal, I confess that in hunting elephants and lions under certain