does anyone else here collect any taxidermy, oddities or other such things?

I took my girlfriend to a bug pinning class for her birthday and its become a new hobby on top of our collecting this stuff hobby.

here's one she just finished... Scorpion Vs. Tarantula!

I took an entemology class at SMCC. Lot's of field trips and pinning. Great fun. But like a lot of fishermen I know I am a catch and release guy so that goes for everything from insect to reptiles. (As I have gotten older I have stopped catching small mammels)

My favorite are the different types of Mantis.

yeah I dont think I could get myself to catch anything. We buy them dried and dead from a local place. They say their supplier finds them dead, but they dont really know..

I like the mantis too
Those I let go
But the rest of bugdom is open season!
I loved helping my kids in biology make the pinned bug collections catching was the fun part
Mostly I have collected cicadas
I keep many dried dead ones on my dresser in a glass box with shelves

The scorpion/tarantula diorama is awesome!

Every year we have a bug fair at the natural history museum in LA. Huge! LA likes to rock the party.

http://www.nhm.org/site/activities-prog ... ge-gallery

http://www.flickr.com/search/?ss=2&w=al ... air&m=text

I spent a year in an entomology lab pinning and categorizing Diptera(flies) I never want to pin another bug again.

When I was 10 or 11 I got into insects and went about collecting specimens to study. I was living in Arizona at the time, and the apartment complex where my family lived was rather lush with landscaping plants, and I think they were all over watered too. So there were a ton of bugs to catch. I used a home made kill jar with cotton balls soaked in acetone to kill the bugs. But it didn't always work properly on the bigger ones. I caught this one green grasshopper that was maybe 3" long and thought it was dead. About a week after I pinned the guy, the rear legs started twitching occasionally. This kept up for maybe a month. I don't know but maybe there was still some metabolism going on in the critter. I thought it was pretty creepy at the time, but I couldn't bring myself to "release" him or throw him out. I figured he was a zombie at that point.

I think you're safer sticking to the pre-killed bugs.