Marie Gicquel, edited by Laura Laplaud 11:29 a.m., February 10, 2022
It is one of the museums that has suffered the least from the pandemic with more than two million visitors in 2021, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
The establishment was able to count on its large gallery of evolution and its hundreds of stuffed animals.
Europe 1 went behind the scenes of this institution, to the taxidermists.
It is a museum that amazes young and old and which has not been too affected by the pandemic, the National Museum of Natural History.
The establishment welcomed more than 2.1 million visitors in 2021 against more than three million people usually.
A strange welcome committee of lions, bears, giraffes and monkeys, open mouths lined up in the greatest of calms.
It is in this suspended zoo, the taxidermy shed, that Justine is preparing the next exhibition at the Museum on felines.
"I work on a manul cat, it's a species of wild cat which is really cute because it has a lot of hair and a very round head, it's adorable", she describes.
Bring "the soul to the specimen"
In the cupboards, chemical products, scalpels, needles to sew skins and small boxes full of marbles.
"There are a lot of bird eyes with all these incredible colors of red, green, yellow... Few mammals have these colors," she explains.
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"It is by putting this eye that we give a little soul to the specimen", continues Justine.
A way also to return their soul to the missing animals.
"It's a bit of a legacy that we leave to future generations of this animal that we may not have other means of seeing and realizing what it really was", breathes she.
In the spring, the future guest of this very high hangar will be the mammoth of the gallery.
This emblematic figure will also benefit from a small makeover.