Stuffed animals adorning the walls of villains were common in Hindi movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Though they are no longer seen in today’s films, but the Wildlife Taxidermy Centre (WTC) at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivli has been steadily working towards preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of dead animals.

Santosh Gaikwad, who heads the Wildlife Taxidermy Centre, with a tiger he has worked on.

The centre, which was set up on March 31, 2009 and started operations on October 1 in the same year, has done the taxidermy of over 100 animals, birds and reptiles, including the exotic Snow Leopard and Siberian tiger, since its inception. But over the last one year, the centre has been plagued with requests from far-flung institutes and forest divisions including the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy, Dehradun and the Natural History Museum at Darjeeling, to do the taxidermy of birds and animals.