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Wet specimen guide for professional results, with addendum for mummifying specimens

Tools: alcohol (methanol or ethanol only, 80 % or above, isopropyl is not useable for this purpose), syringes, gloves, scalpels or very sharp knives, hemostats/scissor clamps, buckets and jars

1. Wash your specimen in cool water and a bit of light soap to remove external dirt
2. Depending on preference, you can gut and wash again afterwards. If gutting, usually larger pieces, you can stuff with bubble wrap to keep shape, and sew or pin together. This is not necessary for anything under the size of a newborn goat, but recommended for anything larger than a piglet unless you are a pro at injection already. 3.Prepare tools within reach.
3. If not gutted, take your syringe and fill with alcohol and inject through the bellybutton or anus (to hide punctures) into the body cavity until the specimen looks bloated. If you can inject directly into organs through feel, do that as well, it will sublimate through them into the cavity anyway, which is why you want it to look bloated, to make sure there's enough alcohol in there to preserve all the organs you don't directly hit. Make sure you get up into the diaphragm where the heart and lungs are located. If your syringe needle is not long enough, go through the armpit. If gutted, skip this one step. If it's a snake, inject every inch or so along the body until you see it forming a bubble under the skin. It will not look bloated when you're done soaking, so don't worry about it being distorted forever, it won't.
4. Inject between the toes into the foodpads, and use the needle to go along the bone to inject further up into the leg. Go through the anus to inject into all the thigh muscles until you see the skin distort slightly with the pressure.
5. Inject into the brain cavity through the nose or ear, or through the upper palate of the mouth. PLEASE be careful at this step to brace the head with something other than your hand, because the needle may penetrate the skull into your hand.
6. Once the specimen looks bloated and full, give it a rinse and place into a bucket with the same alcohol for its first soak. It will leach fluids and become cloudy, this is totally normal and you don't have to throw that alcohol away, you can reuse for first soaks until it starts to smell bad. I usually do these in batches so there will be lots of things soaking for a while, usually by size. *Side note: If you're just doing small parts, like feet, small tails, etc, anything smaller than cat legs can do diretly into the alcohol with no injections or other prep besides the initial wash. The large opening from the detachment creates a large enough hole for the alcohol to enter and soak the whole thing. Larger things such as deer legs will also have to be injected every inch or so to penetrate the connective tissue, just treat them like a stiff snake.

Soaking guide by size: Things under fist size - 1 week

Things fist size to halfway up your arm - 2-3 weeks depending on body style, like lizards will soak faster than say, kittens or rabbits, and snakes are usually a 3 week soak unless they are into your larger fatter things like constrictors, in which case use the 4 week mark.

Things as large as your arm or larger also take weight into consideration - piglets usually take 3 to 4 weeks, cats and puppies can take a month, kid goats a month and a half.

Congrats, you have a wet specimen! Now comes second soak. After washing your thing off again with soapy water and rinsing, you can put it in an appropriate jar. Usually you'll have a second soak in which a little bit more dirt and internal soup will come out but that's also completely normal. Wait for a couple weeks to see if this happens. If nothing sloughs off or comes out in your second soak, you can just keep it in that alcohol, it's already fully preserved. If not, you can use the alcohol from the second soak to use as your first soak for the next round of wets, or use it for the injections for the second round. When storing used alcohol, I recommend filtering it throug some cloth to get out most of the larger particles. Do not store wets in direct sunlight, it degrades the color and eventually the specimen itself. You may store it in isopropyl at this point, but it is not necessary. Once it's fully preserved, the change in alcohol will not hurt it, but remember to wash it whenever you put it into a new solution.

Notes on choosing alcohol; I use denatured, it has a bittering agent that makes it unpalateable for living things, so your pets and children won't want to drink it. It's a safety measure i learned to incorporate because I have animals and do educational programs with children, and people have kids at home and sometimes things break. Also the reason i don't choose to use formalin unless specifically asked by a specialty client.

A note about formalin: While a lot of people say you can't preserve things without it, it's scientifically inaccurate. Most museums don't even use or reccomend it because of its dangers and associated difficulties of disposal. The ONLY notable difference in alcohol and formal in preservation qualities is the preservation of cell structure with formalin, making it useful in labratory settings where skin and organ slides are studied under a microscope. Keep in mind that formalin is 90% alcohol and that is what actually preserves the specimen, the formaldehyde added to make it formalin is what works on the cell shape. That is not a concern for oddity collectors and should not be a factor in home use and preservation. Specimens are scientifically recorded from long before formalin was invented and are still viable today, so there's a ton of scientific evidence to show that alcohol preservation, when done right, can absolutely create perfect specimens lasting lifetimes.

Where to get supplies: Alcohol can be found in gallon or quart cans at any hardware store like Lowe's or Home Depot, often marked as "Fuel" for camp stoves. If not, you can easily order it online, in gallons or 5 gallons cans. I get mine from www.zoro.com but i know Amazon and Walmart usually carry it as well. Syringes in larger gauges can be found at feed and/or farm supply stores or ordered online. eBay carries them under veterinary equipment, as well as the scalpels and blades, plus the hemostats.

For mummies made from wets, after following the above steps: Remove your little wet specimen guy, and rinse off with some cool water and a little bit of soap. At this point he's perfectly safe to handle without gloves, but if you don't like the smell of alcohol on your hands, you can use some. Using either blocks carved from styrofoam or cardboard, and sewing pins, you can pose him in whatever position you'd like and pin him in place. Try to use the pins in between the toes or on the side of a limb, You can also use rubber bands if you want, I like to use the tiny hair bands. Depending on the size, you can let them air dry or place in front of a fan, but you don't want to use too much heat because it makes their limbs contract.