specimens. In front of a stiff mounted wombat, Don passed us off to Sandy Ingleby, the Australian Museum's curator of mammals. She was the custodian of the dead objects that contained the tiger's life code.
“Cute wombat,” Alexis said, pointing at the taxidermy.
Sandy laughed and flicked her flaming red hair. We noticed she lacked the semi-embalmed look of other specimen curators we had met. As she took us past the rows of mint green metal cabinets that held her lifeless charges, we caught a few of the labels: kangaroos, sugar gliders, quolls. All together, Sandy said, there were 41,300 specimens in the Australian Museum's mammal collection. Next to a tall, padlocked cabinet set slightly apart from the rest, we saw a photograph of a Tasmanian tiger with three half-grown pups backed into the corner of a wooden enclosure. With their wide eyes, they looked both wary and vulnerable. The photograph was taken in 1924.
“I call this my exhibit of extinct mammal specimens,” Sandy said, unlocking the cabinet. Inside, sliding trays were jammed with pelts, skulls, taxidermy, and boxes and jars containing body parts—each neatly numbered and labeled. Sandy reeled off some of the names of the dead: the Tasmanian tiger, the Toolache wallaby, the desert bandicoot, the broadfaced potoroo, the lesser bilby, the Darling Downs hopping mouse.
Though nearly two dozen animals were represented, half the space was devoted to the remains of the thylacine, totaling fifty-seven items. Sandy pulled out a tray and showed us the flattened, tanned pelt of a tiger. Its head was wolflike, the triangular ears crumpled with age, its eyeless sockets staring up at us. To say these objects were rare was an understatement. “They're not making any more of these,” Sandy pointed out. “At least not that we know of.”
The fur of the tiger pelt was ginger-colored (a mixture of brown, wheat, and gold). Broad chocolate brown stripes cut across the back, taperingto a point on the lower flanks. Each stripe was different, like a ragged brushstroke.
“Can we touch it?”
“Go ahead.”
We ran our fingers lightly down the stripes. The fur felt rough, slightly bristly. We wondered if it had felt softer in life.
Sandy lifted up a female specimen and pointed out the pouch on its pale belly. It was a scooplike indentation just beneath the tail. “The thylacine pouch is round and rearward-facing, because it's an animal on all fours,” she said. Unlike a kangaroo, whose pouch opens forward and up, the thylacine pouch faced backward, so that mother tigers could run through the bush without injuring their pups. Inside the pouch, Sandy showed us that one of the dead thylacine's four teats was enlarged. The animal had been suckling a pup when it was killed.
Wearing white cotton gloves, Sandy assembled a still life of tiger remains on a long table, laying out two skulls, an articulated skeleton, a tiger brain in a jar of yellow-green liquid, and a skin.
For some people, being around preserved body parts, bones, and pickled organs might be uncomfortable. Not Alexis. He was like Norman Bates at a taxidermy blowout sale, rearranging the body bits and pieces, posing them for photographs. He fingered the heavy, elongated skulls, opening and closing the jaws to re-create the tiger's famous 120-degree gape. Their inch-long, inward-curving fangs were backed up by rows of knife-sharp teeth.
Sandy didn't seem to think there was anything strange about Alexis's fascination. She pulled out a taxidermy of a tiger—a skin mounted on a frame, with glass eyes inserted into the head. It wasn't very good. The tiger looked like it had died of a hangover—it was bug-eyed, cringing, and posed unnaturally in mid-crouch. A patch of hair below the neck had come off. We could never have fallen in love with this sad creature.
“What a hack job,” said Alexis.
Sandy agreed. “The mounting is of pretty low quality. It's fairly Eurocentric, very placental mammal rather than
“Cute wombat,” Alexis said, pointing at the taxidermy.
Sandy laughed and flicked her flaming red hair. We noticed she lacked the semi-embalmed look of other specimen curators we had met. As she took us past the rows of mint green metal cabinets that held her lifeless charges, we caught a few of the labels: kangaroos, sugar gliders, quolls. All together, Sandy said, there were 41,300 specimens in the Australian Museum's mammal collection. Next to a tall, padlocked cabinet set slightly apart from the rest, we saw a photograph of a Tasmanian tiger with three half-grown pups backed into the corner of a wooden enclosure. With their wide eyes, they looked both wary and vulnerable. The photograph was taken in 1924.
“I call this my exhibit of extinct mammal specimens,” Sandy said, unlocking the cabinet. Inside, sliding trays were jammed with pelts, skulls, taxidermy, and boxes and jars containing body parts—each neatly numbered and labeled. Sandy reeled off some of the names of the dead: the Tasmanian tiger, the Toolache wallaby, the desert bandicoot, the broadfaced potoroo, the lesser bilby, the Darling Downs hopping mouse.
Though nearly two dozen animals were represented, half the space was devoted to the remains of the thylacine, totaling fifty-seven items. Sandy pulled out a tray and showed us the flattened, tanned pelt of a tiger. Its head was wolflike, the triangular ears crumpled with age, its eyeless sockets staring up at us. To say these objects were rare was an understatement. “They're not making any more of these,” Sandy pointed out. “At least not that we know of.”
The fur of the tiger pelt was ginger-colored (a mixture of brown, wheat, and gold). Broad chocolate brown stripes cut across the back, taperingto a point on the lower flanks. Each stripe was different, like a ragged brushstroke.
“Can we touch it?”
“Go ahead.”
We ran our fingers lightly down the stripes. The fur felt rough, slightly bristly. We wondered if it had felt softer in life.
Sandy lifted up a female specimen and pointed out the pouch on its pale belly. It was a scooplike indentation just beneath the tail. “The thylacine pouch is round and rearward-facing, because it's an animal on all fours,” she said. Unlike a kangaroo, whose pouch opens forward and up, the thylacine pouch faced backward, so that mother tigers could run through the bush without injuring their pups. Inside the pouch, Sandy showed us that one of the dead thylacine's four teats was enlarged. The animal had been suckling a pup when it was killed.
Wearing white cotton gloves, Sandy assembled a still life of tiger remains on a long table, laying out two skulls, an articulated skeleton, a tiger brain in a jar of yellow-green liquid, and a skin.
For some people, being around preserved body parts, bones, and pickled organs might be uncomfortable. Not Alexis. He was like Norman Bates at a taxidermy blowout sale, rearranging the body bits and pieces, posing them for photographs. He fingered the heavy, elongated skulls, opening and closing the jaws to re-create the tiger's famous 120-degree gape. Their inch-long, inward-curving fangs were backed up by rows of knife-sharp teeth.
Sandy didn't seem to think there was anything strange about Alexis's fascination. She pulled out a taxidermy of a tiger—a skin mounted on a frame, with glass eyes inserted into the head. It wasn't very good. The tiger looked like it had died of a hangover—it was bug-eyed, cringing, and posed unnaturally in mid-crouch. A patch of hair below the neck had come off. We could never have fallen in love with this sad creature.
“What a hack job,” said Alexis.
Sandy agreed. “The mounting is of pretty low quality. It's fairly Eurocentric, very placental mammal rather than
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