I remember seeing this Lizard crawling to our bug zapper and it died.

I felt so bad for this poor lizard; I felt just this need to commemorate him.

So after dinner I took that lizard and put it in that tin and I thought just like my plants and seashells and stuff that he would just you know dry out and be there with them and sort of live on.

When I was really young I always thought of where death and life meet and how much death is around us and how much it is a part of life.

All I’m doing is skinning the animal right now.

I sprayed a little bit of water to sort of mat down the hair.

I think my favorite animals to work with are the young animals like stillborn animals or like babies that didn’t make it or ones that were sick.

They’re the most emotional ones to work on because, you know, they were young and to us, like, a baby of any kind that doesn’t make it is really touching.

I use a lot of flowers and crystals and really like, I guess, quote un-quote girly type of things. But that’s just cause I aesthetically like them.

Birds are especially fascinating because just the really simple fact that they fly and that’s always sort of captures our imagination.

I would say with birds it’s probably really challenging to deal with missing feathers or pinned feathers.

Sometimes, you know, they’re just not in the greatest condition.

Most taxidermists don’t want those things. They want something perfect that will be this perfect mount.

So I guess my work is really driven by taking things that are imperfect and seeing like a way to commemorate them and really honoring them.

For me the feeling I get when I do taxidermy is intimacy and I’m really always in awe by anything I see on my table or on my workbench.

I feel like this is how I can connect to nature and sort of come to terms with mortality.

From quails and chickens to pigs and rabbits, I’ve done my best to turn their carcasses into food. I wasn’t just cooking or just eating; I was honoring them by making a memorable meal. But as the past couple of weeks have taught me, food isn’t the only way to give a dead animal a kind of immortality. Divya Anantharaman, a 30-year-old taxidermist, does it in her own special way.

Unlike traditional taxidermists (a male-dominated profession), Divya isn’t interested in taking a well-preserved exotic pelt and mounting it so it appears alive. Instead, she turns road kill or animals that have been discarded by the food industry, pet food factories or bird enthusiasts (whatever she can fit in her freezer) into works of art. And she does everything herself, from skinning to mounting. The end result is something whimsical and unsettling (imagine a duck skull with little ducklings and bright, pink feathers sticking out of each eye socket, or a pigeon studded with pearls), an intersection between art and science.

It was her mother, a biology teacher, who first got her hooked on anatomy. But it was her interest in our complex relationships with animals (the ones we pet, the ones we eat and the ones we throw away) that led her to the world of rogue taxidermy. The specimens she works with are rarely in perfect condition, but it is precisely in the imperfections — missing feathers or rough patches of fur — that her art comes to life.

If you thought taxidermy was a dying art, think again. Artists like Divya are breathing new life into the craft, and they’ve found a mainstream audience that shares their fascination with the beautiful and the macabre.