Lady Gaga wearing her infamous meat dress

It wasn’t enough that Lady Gaga chose to wear a dress made entirely of meat to the MTV Video Music Awards. But now the dress has been preserved by taxidermist Sergio Vigilato.

Vigilato was contacted by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum a couple of months after Lady Gaga wore the meat dress on stage in Sept. 2010, to accept the trophy for the year’s best music video at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Vigilato said, “The first thing I asked was, ‘Where is the dress? This thing could have maggots by now.’  I understood them to say it was in a room with air conditioning. I said make sure it’s in a freezer.”

The dress was in fact frozen stiff — and free of maggots — when it was delivered to Vigilato’s taxidermy shop, but as he defrosted it, Vigilato discovered that the dress had started decomposing before it had been frozen. And as it thawed, it developed an odor.

It took Vigilato more than a month to clean and preserve the meat.

Lady Gaga’s explanation of her reason for wearing the meat dress consisted of a vague claim to standing up for our rights:

Well, it is certainly no disrespect to anyone that is vegan or vegetarian. As you know, I am the most judgment-free human being on the earth. However, it has many interpretations, but for me this evening … if we don’t stand up for what we believe in and if we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon we’re going to have as much rights as the meat on our own bones. And I am not a piece of meat.

To preserve the dress, Vigilato first cleaned and preserved the thawed meat, reconditioned it to make it pliable, then glued the meat slabs to a mannequin in a pattern to resemble Fernandez’s original dress. He then dyed it dark red to resemble its color when Lady Gaga wore it. It was shipped in May to the Rock & Roll museum in Cleveland.

In June, the dress went on display as part of the Hall of Fame’s “Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power” exhibit, which runs through February.

“After that, it will tour other museums if it holds together,” said Jim Henke, chief curator for the Hall of Fame.

Last September, Lady Gaga told Vanity Fair magazine, “I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.”

If the “meat dress” is a result of her creativity, I find myself wishing that the Lady would get herself well and truly laid.

A bald eagle was among the endangered and protected species that Dickson offered for sale on CraigsList

A Pacifica, California, man has been sentenced to six months in prison for using CraigsList to sell taxidermy mounts of a Siberian tiger, a polar bear, a black panther, and other endangered species.

James Dickson, 57, pleaded guilty in April to a felony count of illegal trade of protected wildlife. He will begin serving his sentence Aug. 11, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said at a hearing Tuesday in San Francisco. Dickson was also ordered to pay $2,200 in restitution to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Dickson admitted that he sold a mounted American bald eagle to an undercover U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent for $2,200 in November 2009, after the agent contacted Dickson about a CraigsList ad in which Dickson offered a stuffed polar bear for $6,500. Dickson offered to sell the agent the mounted polar bear, a stuffed black bear, and the eagle, and said he knew that it was illegal to sell all three of them.

The bald eagle is protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prohibits harming or killing protected birds.

Dickson  admitted to selling or offering many other protected big game animals on CraigsList, including mounts of a Kodiak bear for $14,000, a Siberian tiger for $15,000, and a black bear for $3,800, plus the summer coat of a grizzly bear for $4,500, the shoulder mount of a grizzly bear for $2,500, a cheetah rug for $900, and a stuffed black panther for $4,500.

Dermestid Beetles Cleaning A Skull

If you are creating a European mount of a skull, especially one with antlers, you may want to consider Dermestid beetles as an alternative to the tedious and unpleasant process of boiling and manually removing hide and tissue from the skull. Antlers may be discolored by boiling water or hydrogen peroxide, and even a bird or small animal skull with no antlers can be quite a challenge to properly clean for a European mount display. Even very small tissue residue can create quite an unpleasant smell, and can attract damaging pests.

Dermestid beetles (Dermestes maculatus) are also called carpet beetles, skin or hide beetles, and larder beetles. They are late-stage carrion feeders, typically eating the parts of dead animals left behind by carnivores and vultures. In taxidermy and in museums, their ability to pick a skull or skeleton completely clean of any soft tissue is very useful in the preservation process. The beetles will not eat or damage bone, though they will eat cartilage and connective tissue once everything else is gone.

Bones cleaned by Dermestid beetles are not subject to the harsh process of boiling, scraping, picking, and chemically cleaning and sterilizing that can cause damage and/or discoloration. Once the beetles have done their work, only pure, white bone will remain, with no staining and no scratch marks or breakage from tools.

Breeding and caring for a Dermestid Beetle colony

You can grow a dermestid beetle colony in an old aquarium, refrigerator or cooler, but make sure they have some ventilation and also that they cannot escape. The larvae will need something into which they can burrow to pupate, and most people use foam blocks or pieces of corrugated cardboard.

The environment should be slightly moist and warm, so keep the container in a warm place and spray with a small amount of mist occasionally if it seems too dry. Too little moisture will slow down colony eating and growth, while too much can lead to troubles from mites and/or mold fungus, with potentially disastrous results for the dermestid beetles.

Dermestid beetles prefer “moist-dry” food sources. That oxymoronic description just means dermestid beetles want to eat jerky, not beef. In practical terms for taxidermists and museum researchers, this means that if you can remove tissue from a skull before handing it to the beetles, you should do so, and the remaining tissue should be the consistency of beef jerky. Once the beetles have thoroughly cleaned a skull, it is cleaned, degreased and whitened further in preparation for a European mount. If securing it to a plaque for wall mounting, a belt sander can be used to create a flat area that will be flush with the mounting board surface.

When Yvonne Rodriguez’s dog Muneca died six years ago, she didn’t want to say goodbye, so she paid $800 to get her pet stuffed at a San Antonio taxidermy studio.

“I didn’t want to go without seeing her so I had her stuffed, and when it’s time for me to go, she’s going to be going with me,” says Rodriguez.

“We’ve gotten iguanas, lizards, birds, parrots, cats… multiple times we’ve gotten cats,” said Bradley Garcia of Ottea’s Taxidermy. Garcia said he doesn’t get many requests to skin, tan, mount, and dry domestic animals, and that recreating a family member is not easy. “We know our artwork into [pets] may be different from your animal, since you’re with it daily. We don’t know what the pet looks like, like you do, you know, the facial expressions, what your cat or dog’s ear looks like.”

Rodriguez said that it was a cost worth paying to keep Muneca around forever. “She was always there with me, always took care of me. I always tried to take care of her.”