How do you not know what a lion looks like when you have a literal lion delivered to you?
I am not a taxidermist (IANAT?), but if I had to guess dead animals look nothing like their living counterparts when given a few days to decay. Taxidermists probably do a ton of work reconstructing things like their faces and that requires knowing what the original face looked like for the model to be accurate. In the works of fiction where I’ve encountered taxidermy it tends to be treated as something of a morbid art.
They were also blind.
Do these people not know what a dog looks like?
A lion really isn’t that far off when it comes to proportions, closer than whatever the fuck this is at least…
From Snopes:
An alternative theory holds that the creature’s altered appearance in taxidermy form was intentional and/or the result of the taxidermist’s expectation that the animal would be viewed only from a particular angle:When seen from the side the lion actually has quite a ferocious appearance. In this context, the lion’s bizarre tongue and fake teeth make some kind of sense. Even the close-set position of the eyes seems to have been done in order to make them appear furrowed and angry. Perhaps the taxidermist simply focused too much on side-view images when mounting the pelt, or the lion was (somehow) never intended to be seen from more than one angle.
focused too much on side-view images
“Images” in this case would likely mean illustrations drawn by someone in some book. From the side, it kind of looks like one of those… doesn’t really explain the bizarre tongue, but the rest, kind of.
Yeah, that sounds like the most plausible explanation. It’s supposed to look like a heraldic lion passant: https://i.imgur.com/ZReMGZF.jpg
It’s even worse in real life, because somehow it gets worse with every angle you look at it from. It’s also got a name. They call it Leo. I call it cursed.
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Idk but have a hunch this was sent to a taxiderpist & not a taxidermist, and that no familiarity with lions would… have helped.
TaxiDERPery is an art, we’ll 'av you know.
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