Cetacean Taxidermy

This list is ongoing. I welcome corrections, additions, and additional info. I'm interested mostly in full-body or almost-full-body taxidermy, not wet specimens or isolated preserved body parts.

 

I love natural history museums of all calibers, and I’ve visited quite a few, but among the menageries of dead animals that I’ve witnessed, one group of animals is always missing – cetaceans. If they are present, it’s usually in the form of skeletons or scale models, which are wonderful in their own right, but I always wondered why whales and dolphins in particular never seemed to be the subject of taxidermy.

Above are some archive photos from the Field Museum of Natural History documenting the creation of a model narwhal. While I’m sure methods vary, I imagine most museum models share a similar conception and birth. These models contain 0% actual cetacean. In this case, a lifelike narwhal was sculpted out of clay, cast in plaster, and then a lighter “final” model was made from the cast using celluloid, a plastic.

While doing reading for my Alula Whale article, I discovered whale taxidermy DOES exist. However, there’s a reason examples are so rare.

I found one explanation for this in Seals and Whales of the British Museum (p. 66), where John Edward Gray notes

“It is almost impossible to preserve their skin, it being very thin and apt to crack and curl up; and when preserved, they are difficult to keep without deterioration, on account of the fat and salt they contain, and the odour they emit, especially in damp weather. For this reason, in the Paris and some other museums, they have prepared a series of plaster models to illustrate the genera.”

While incredibly difficult, it is not impossible. However, the difficulty means the results of past attempts are usually not very pretty. This post will be an attempted catalogue of all the examples of cetacean taxidermy I can find, in no particular order.

 

Malm Whale, Gothenburg Museum of Natural History, Sweden

 

Image source. Far and away the best known example of cetacean taxidermy is the Malm Whale, a preserved young Blue Whale. The mount was created in 1865, the skin pulled over a wooden frame and the jaw articulated in such a way that it can be opened and people can climb inside. While overall a success, the blue whale is no longer blue, its skin having discoloured to a dark patchy brown at some point during the preservation process.

A great deal has been written about this whale, to the point where it eclipses most other cases of cetacean taxidermy, so I won’t dwell on it here. I do, however, question its oft-repeated status as the world’s only taxidermied baleen whale.

 

Harbour Porpoise, Cambridge Museum of Zoology, England

 

Shared by my Twitter friend PetrichorCrown. As you can see, it clearly suffers a discolouration problem similar to the Malm Whale, although its overall form looks a bit more true-to-life. Other issues I see in taxidermy whales and dolphins is visible skin puckering and visible stiches.

 

Bottlenose Dolphin, La Salle Museum, Costa Rica

 

Shared by Twitter friend @wingcoaster. Here it looks like the taxidermist painted the dolphin in an attempt to get around the discolouration issue. I know this is standard practice in fish taxidermy, but the effect on the skin of a dolphin is somewhat uncanny.

 

Stenella longirostris roseiventris, National Museum of Natural History, France

 

This image comes from the 1999 paper Spinner Dolphins of the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia: Pelagic and Shallow-water Forms by William F. Perrin et al. I came across it while researching the Alula Whale post and it was my first time seeing a confirmed example of cetacean taxidermy.

 

Sei Whale, Fribourg Natural History Museum, Switzerland

 

This young Sei Whale, dubbed Marlene, died in 1852 and became a permanent fixture of the Natural History Museum in 1881. Photo comes from this article by Atlas Obscura.

Indus River Dolphin, Pakistan

 

This image comes from a 2020 article about how Muhammad Irfan, a 64 year old retiree and supposedly Pakistan’s only taxidermist, was tasked with preserving an Indus River Dolphin.

 

Baiji, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

 

These images come from 2011. This is one of those “I think it’s taxidermy” cases because the description is not super clear. If this is a mounted cetacean, its skin has been so thickly covered with paint and primer that it may as well be a synthetic model. The only traits that make me think this might be a real dolphin is the overall quality, the wonky form and the fact that it’s under glass.

The museum also houses a wet specimen. I wasn't counting wet specimens as taxidermy here, but here's an example of what that looks like.

 

The above image appears to be a different specimen at the same museum. The discoloration is evident and possible stitching can be seen under the tail. This photo comes from 2017

 

Finless Porpoise and Baiji, National Zoological Museum of China

 

Image 1 and image 2. These, I’m almost certain are taxidermy, just based on their qualities. To quote the original description, “The photo was taken by Linda Wong, Deputy Secretary-General of China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF), on March 31, 2024”.

 

Baiji, Shanghai Natural History Museum, China

 

Image comes from Flickr user Hamish Robertson, shared Nov 2009.

 

Ganges River Dolphin, La Specola, Italy

 

Shared on Flickr in 2007 by Curious Expeditions.

 

 

 

Potential Taxidermy or Provenience Unknown

The descriptions of these images were lacking in detail.

 

Bottlenose Dolphin, United States, 1914

 

This image comes from the 1914 book Nature Neighbors, with contributions from multiple photographers. The source of the dolphin is not given. The strange bulbous shape and brownish colour makes me think this is taxidermy.

 

10 meter long whale, 2012, Rikuzentakata City Maritime Museum / National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, Japan

 

Image and full description. This photo is giving SCP Foundation but I’m including it here in the interest of documenting it. This whale was part of a large scale museum specimen rescue effort in Miyagi Prefecture following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.

 

Bottlenose Dolphin, Netherlands

 

Image source. Potentially an image of a recently stuffed (or soon to be stuffed) dolphin who has not yet suffered discolouration. The description, translated from Dutch, goes as follows: “April Fools' Jokes : Around April 1, 1914, the magazine Het Leven published a false article about a sleeping sickness epidemic in the Netherlands. Here is a so-called shark on which eggs of the mosquito that supposedly transmits this disease were found. In reality, this is a stuffed dolphin. The Netherlands, 1914.”

 

River Dolphin? Museu de Pesca, Brazil

 

These images come from Flickr user Wanderlei Talib, taken in 2010. My only reason for thinking they might be taxidermy is the fact that they’re wonky, but they could just as well be wonky models.

 

Rorqual, 2009

 

Image comes from Flickr user mazgai, February 16, 2009. Provenience totally unknown, but this user shared other images from a taxidermy collection taken the same day.

 

 

Delphinus boryi - Bory's Dolphin

 

 

Species: Bory's dolphin, delphinus Boryi. (Not illustrated.) New species.

Essential characteristics: Rather long beak, very flattened and quite broad near the head; head not very high; dorsal fin positioned equidistant from the tip of the snout and the body, a very soft mouse-gray; underside bluish-gray, sides of the head ivory-white, clearly separated rom the colour of the upperparts by a straight line.

Dimensions: Size of the Common Dolphin.

Description and Location: We owe to the friendship of Colonel Bory de Saint-Vincent, one of our most zealous naturalists, the communication of a very good drawing of this species, as well as the short description he gave of it, which we have just reported.

He encountered it at two different times, between the islands of Madagascar, Île de France [Mauritius], and the Mascarene Islands. Its habits seemed similar to those of the dolphins of our seas [France]. Upon capturing one, the sailors were struck by the white color on the side of its head, which included the eyes. They likened this color, so clearly separated from the gray of the top of its skull by a very straight and sharp lateral line, to a mustache. The bluish stripes or transverse bands on the underside of its body disappeared almost entirely after the animal's death.

Captain Mylius [Pierre Bernard Milius], the last governor of Mascarene, since his return to France, has given Mr. Bory de Saint-Vincent a picture of an absolutely identical dolphin, but of a very pale Capuchin color, which he had found on the western coast of New Holland [Australia], in the Baie des Chiens-marins [Shark Bay].

    - Desmarest, Mammalogie, ou, Description des espèces de mammifères Part 2, pages 513-514

 

This dolphin description is a bit older than my recent entries, coming from 1822. I’ve found that the further back in natural history you go, the more outlandish the cetaceans tend to get, although this dolphin’s description is fairly mundane. The main reason I wanted to draw it was not due to the description alone, but rather because of how much the associated illustration deviates from the description.

 

This illustration was reproduced in a handful of subsequent books, and its grotesqueness stood out to me.

The book it comes from, Mammalogie ou description des espèces des Mammifères (1820) by Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest, was a compendium describing all known mammals at the time, including extinct ones. Also notable is that Desmarest made use of binomial nomenclature (the two part scientific name), which wasn’t always followed at the time. Carl Linnaeus established the basic rules of binomial nomenclature in Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, but it evidently took a while to catch on, roughly a century.

But back to the illustration. For this series, I usually pick cetaceans that haven’t been illustrated, haven’t been illustrated recently or haven’t been illustrated very well. This is a case of the latter. The dolphin’s namesake is colonel Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, another French naturalist better known for his work in botany than zoology, who relayed the physical description. Desmarest appeared to collaborate with him on several occasions. An illustration is mentioned, potentially created by Pierre Bernard Milius, but it is not provided with the original description which explicitly notes there is “Non figure”. I’d like to assume that the illustration that shows up in later publications is based on Milius’ image, but I have no idea. At the moment, I believe the oldest book to include the Delphinus boryi illustration is Complements de Buffon, published 18 years (1838) after Desmarest’s original description. The illustration shares its page with an illustration of the Crowned Dolphin.

Bory de Saint-Vincent – naturalist, colonel, and avid proponent of scientific racism.

 

This illustration is not terribly reflective of the original description. Even Hershkovitz notes in his 1966 Catalog of Living Whales (p. 197) that “color of figure only vaguely resembles description in text”. Jefferson 2021 (p. 62) suggests that the animal being described might possibly be a Pantropical Spotted Dolphin.

The illustration copied in Die vollständigste Naturgeschichte der Vögel

 

I have my own theory regarding this vague illustration, which is that it was based on a dead dolphin, not a living one.

The best time to illustrate a whale is when you have a dead one because they are incredibly hard to observe accurately at sea. If you look at old illustrations, you will notice a trend of dead and beached whales, some looking rather poorly and others looking surprisingly indifferent given the circumstances.

Most of these illustrations appear to be made after recently dead cetaceans, but my theory is that the Bory’s Dolphin image depicts a dolphin that is starting to decompose. As beached dolphins decompose, their skin goes dark and taut, pulling back to reveal their teeth and, as decomposition progresses, reveal the shape of the skull. The beak in the illustration looks remarkably skull-like to me, and perhaps the weird Fulmar-like cere at the base of the beak is skin pulling back from the bone. I don’t have any proof of this beyond how the drawing looks, I don’t know the conditions this was sketched in, this is just a hunch of mine.

Image source

On a slightly lighter note…

Here’s my Bory’s Dolphin illustration acting as a luggage identifier at Furnal Equinox 2026. Bory’s Dolphin was one of the first drawings I made for this project and I was exceptionally proud of it because it genuinely looked like something you might seen in a field guide.