His second wife Ruth died in April, six months before him. He was married twice, the first time to Watsonville native Lorene Williamson. “There was this warmth to him that I don’t know that people would have seen, if they just interacted with him in his shop.” “From the very first time I met Unc, he always gave me a big bear hug, every time,” Anne Gurnee said. He shied away from family pets, explaining in a 2011 interview that “I don’t do members of the family.”Ĭalled “Unc” by the people who loved him, Gurnee was known as a kind, goofy warm man. This allows the preservation of soft-bodied animals such as slugs and insects. They are then placed in a vacuum, and as pressure is allowed to return, the liquid essentially evaporates from the body and leaves behind the basic structure of the animal. Richard Gurnee’s process is different from traditional taxidermy, in which the skin of the animal is removed and preserved, then placed over a synthetic frame.įor the freeze-drying process, wires are inserted in the animals’ limbs and neck to position them into a natural-looking state. The shop will now be run by Mitch Phillips, who interned with Gurnee for five months to learn his techniques. “I think he considered himself really fortunate that he found something he loved that worked for him,” Anne Gurnee said.

It was there he spent the entirety of his career, preserving animals for museums and natural history displays. He returned to Watsonville, where his father helped him set up his shop at 381 East Lake Ave. “It was very impressive, and he made his way in the world.”Īfter graduate school, Gurnee began working at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, where some of his preserved animals are still on display.īut he left in 1965 after a supervisor took credit for his freeze-drying process. “He had this amazing engineering mind, on top of the knowledge of natural history and zoology,” said his niece Anne Gurnee. He then designed and built a system that did just that. By 13, local hunters sought him out to preserve the animals they killed.Īs a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Gurnee was freeze-drying tissue samples when he realized the process could be used for preserving whole animals.

Gurnee graduated from Watsonville High School in 1954, and then studied zoology at Humboldt State University.īut his love for the natural world began earlier than that when he taught himself taxidermy to earn a badge as a Boy Scout. Watsonville native Richard Gurnee, who revolutionized the field of scientific taxidermy by pioneering a freeze-drying technique still employed worldwide, died in October after a brief illness.

Gurnee breaking news now