Pretty much what I suspected about “naked” skin vs fur, which just intuitively seems way more “forgiving.”
most of what makes a human look like themself is not the skin. it’s the bones and muscles and fat in the face, and the perceptions of living humans are incredibly sensitive to subtle variations in those features.
Ohhh this makes complete sense now that you say it; we’re incredibly well tuned for recognizing faces, so I guess not only would it be hard to make the person recognizable, but it might also be hard to not have imperfections in the face that give everyone an “uncanny valley” sort of feeling that something’s off about it?
I can definitely say that the problems with taxidermizing humans was definitely not something I expected to learn about today (or necessarily ever really), so thank you for taking the time to explain all that. It was honestly interesting to learn about something that I had absolutely no knowledge of beforehand.
If you don’t mind me asking, do you know this stuff via actually doing taxidermy, or are you just another infinitely curious person?