For those that dont know, taxidermy is the art of taking the shell of a dead animal, preserving it and wrapping it around a form so as to appear alive.
These would be sweet additions to the fortress. You could mount beast heads on the wall.
You could also slaughter an animal but not cut it up. This would keep the whole animal in one piece and you could make a statue out of the whole thing.
Cuz, yknow, stuffed elephants!
When pets die, instead of burying them you could stuff them and mount the statue somewhere.
ANyhow the process. To be honest i know jack squat about taxidermy, but i saw a documentary on it once so here goes.
The steps:
1: Start with animal corpse, if too mangled you can still use only the head.
2: Butcher cleans the animal, leaving only the skin, horns, teeth ect.
3: Tanner preserves the pieces, leaving the fur and whatnot intact.
4. Statue maker crafts the form that the skin and teeth fit into.
This can be made of pretty much any material, stone is heavy, wood is much lighter. The best option is an inner frame of metal, this is the lightest option and adds the most quality.
5. Glassmaker crafts some fake eyes since it is not possible to preserve the originals, we do not have coloured or painted glass as of yet, but that will probably change later, lets just say we use gems.
6. Someone, probably the tanner, puts the preserved animal skin onto the form. He then adds the teeth and eyes and you have the finished stuffed animal.
Neat huh? We could have trophy rooms and such with these things. Imagine the entrance to your dining hall flanked by stuffed elephants. (lol boatmurdered)
On the other hand, you could also gather up ALL of the dead bones of one animal and string them together to make a whole skeleteon. Exactly like what they do with dinosaur bones in some museums.
The process is a bit different:
1. Kill any animal/reptile without crushing any bones or severing too many limbs (which would also damage bones), pierce weapons are good for this. Likewise a slaughtered animal starts intact. Once processed the corpse becomes "elephant (or leopard, deer ect) skeleton" Instead of "stack of 8 deer bones"
2. Bonecrafter gathers up the skeletons and does restoration work on it. This has a variable difficulty depending on how much damage has been done to a skeleton. This step still applies to pristine skeletons as it includes the drilling of holes and such needed to mount the bones together.
3. Architect plans how the skeleton will be posed, and the supports required, this can be done at the same time as the bonecrafter is working.
4. Once the architect is finished a metalsmith crafts a set of clamps, wires and stands that will hold the skeleton in one piece without being immediatly obvious. The amount of material and time this takes depends on the size of the creature AND what pose you wish to put the animal in. (explained later)
The frame can be made of any metal, the bigger the creature, the stronger the metal you have to use. A bird skeleton would need a little bit of copper. Huge creatures such as giants and Hydrae would require a skeleton of adamantine.
5. Once all the components are ready you have to mount the skeleton somewhere. This can take a lot of room depending on what the creature is, but once the x axis is in you could hang them from the ceiling or something.
First the architect shows up, he plans the site. Then the bonecrafter and metalsmith show up and start putting all the pieces together. This takes a huge amount of time, but once they are done you will have a nice complete skeleton on display.
Note that if fossils are ever implemented, this applies to them as well.
Pose: The pose of the animal or skeleton is what action or movement is it shaped to represent. There are 3 types:
Standing pose: This is an animal in a static position, an elephant standing on all 4 legs, a wolf sitting back on its haunches, a curled up cat ect.
Movement pose: This is an animal in motion. A running deer, a bird in a flight position with wings spread out in flight, stuff like that.
Attack pose: This is the most difficult to pull off because it requires a lot of ackward supports. The effect is quite dramatic though, as there is a huge difference between a standing elephant and an elephant rearing up on its back legs, trunk and tusks waving getting ready to smite you.
A pristine dragon skeleton mounted on top of your main gate will cause quite a stir.
Awesome huh? 
some anphibian feedback would rock
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Topic: Taxidermy and display skeletons :D (Read 10979 times)