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Taxidermy is a dying art kept alive inside the walls of Cal Poly Humboldt – thelumberjack.org
Sep
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By Julia Kelm
While the sight of an animal carcass might make some people queasy, for Wildlife Museum Curator Anna E. Goldman, it is an area of fascination.
“I’ve always been interested in dead things,” Goldman said as she ripped the skin from the body of a recently thawed squirrel for a taxidermy demonstration. “In 3rd grade, for show and tell, I brought in a severed deer leg that still had fur on it. I was really excited, and then the principal called my mom… they thought I was a serial killer.”
This love of death led Goldman to an unconventional career as a taxidermist and museum curator for the Cal Poly Humboldt wildlife department.
Goldman explained that since she’s the only one who maintains it, the museum is hers to manage as well as take care of.
“All of the collections, duties, the databasing, the cataloging, setting up and taking down for classes… everything that happens here is on me,” Goldman said.
Goldman’s day-to-day work weeks can vary greatly. From simply cataloging specimens for the museum to racing off to the shoreline when a whale washes up, things are constantly in flux for Goldman.
When it comes to directly working as a taxidermist, Goldman described a process called museum prep. A procedure in which the skin of an animal is dried out and preserved emphasizing its anatomical structure. It then is placed inside drawers and cabinets at the museum, accessible for students and researchers to take measurements.
“I’m most classically trained in how to prepare specimens for the museum collection, which takes up the least amount of space possible, but also allows you to see all of the notable features of this animal,” Goldman said.
The museum is in the fisheries and wildlife building, only accessible with supervision. Those with access will find drawers and cabinets filled with furs, skins and stuffed critters like chipmunks, mice and beavers lying peacefully as if tucked into bed.
Goldman admitted that taxidermy and museology work is a difficult career field to break into. If it weren’t for her stubborn determination to make taxidermy a career, she would not be where she is today.
Goldman’s journey began in 2006 after finishing her undergraduate degree in biology, with a focus in entomology, at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. She moved back to her birthplace of Chicago, Ill., to work at the Field Museum of Natural History.
There, she spent her early career working primarily with insects. However, when museum positions temporarily dried up due to the lack of immediate long-term work position, Goldman had to take up various retail jobs to make ends meet.
“[I was] still volunteering for the insect division, and then the mammals preparator job at the Field Museum opened up,” Goldman said. “I got so lucky to get [that] job, and it kind of just snowballed.”
Although working with mammals began as a pivot of Goldman’s original love of insects, she has enjoyed this new direction.
In 2015, Goldman desired to go after her PhD in biological science. Unfortunately, she was first met with a massive roadblock. To apply for grad school, she would need to take a standardized test. Goldman said she was never a good tester.
“I was told by the dean of one of these universities that I applied to that, ‘there are museum people, and there’s academics. You’re just a museum person,’” Goldman said. “Give up, basically.”
Every U.S. school that Goldman applied to denied her based solely on her test scores, despite the experience she gained during her time at the Field Museum.
Fortunately, there was a loophole that allowed Goldman to pursue her dreams.
“I figured out that international programs don’t do standardized tests to get in, and a lot of your experience actually is very beneficial,” Goldman said. “So, I was able to get into the University of Hong Kong.”
After Goldman graduated from the University of Hong Kong in 2021, she looked for work back in the States and ended up in Humboldt County.
Now retired, the previous museum curator, Tamar Danufsky, said Humboldt’s collection, though small, boasts many regional specimens.
“Nobody from [University of California], Berkeley is driving up here to pick [roadkill] up and take them back to their collection,” Danufsky said. “It’s an impressive collection for this little university… it’s not what you would expect.”
Goldman explained that the 16,000 specimens housed in the wildlife building provide an excellent resource for study to students and researchers alike for years and years to come.
Junior wildlife major Josh Gellens said the museum is an incredible resource for wildlife majors.
“The specimens curated from the wildlife museum — as well as the zoology department’s vertebrate museum — play such a huge role throughout your courses and interests when it comes to studying anatomy, adaptations and diversity of all the different taxa,” Gellens said. “It’s truly an integral part of being able to get that unique hands-on learning.”
In addition to the museum being a resource for students, it acts as an archive to record history.
“We kind of view natural history museum collections as these libraries of empty books that have yet to be written. There are numerous questions that can be asked and can be discovered just by looking at specimens.” Goldman said.
Goldman said that her position here at Humboldt was a rare blessing; both taxidermy and museum jobs like hers are hard to come by and hardly ever make a lot of money. Despite these factors, Goldman never gave up on her love of dead things and turned her passion into a career.
“I always find it really beautiful that we’re able to give life and preserve this dead animal for so long,” Goldman said. “And that there’s actually scientific value to this otherwise decomposing mess.”
Julia is a journalism major and the co-Editor in Chief of the paper. She loves film and is a regular on Letterboxd. She also enjoys going on walks in the forest and taking pictures to relax. If you have a movie you’d like her to review, please email her at jk328@humboldt.edu.
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