Enrico Alis walks through the Paxton Gate doors on Valencia Street. Animal heads are perched on both walls of the store. With sea stars up close and able to touch, they give the aroma of the ocean in the midst of the Mission district. He stops at the first glass display case containing multiple shelves of rodent skulls. He loves to look at the cream color of the skulls, the smooth mink, and the array of bat, beaver, and turtle skeletons. He would love to take them home but always has a difficult time finding a place in his house where his partner won’t see them. He pushes his hands in his khaki pants and bends lower to observe the bottom shelf of turtle shells. Alis once took a taxidermy class offered at Paxton Gate so that he could overcome his fear of small animals. He also took a butterfly mounting class—he feared bugs, too. Since then, he has bought multiple skulls, and if his partner wasn’t so strict about it, he would buy a taxidermy antelope head.

For the patrons of Paxton Gate Treasures and Oddities, taxidermy is used to tame trepidations, provide scientific education or simply for the artistic appreciation of nature. These animal heads, bodies and skeletons continue to have a purpose even though blood no longer pumps through their hearts. For the people who enjoy and respect them, hearts are still being warmed.

Lauren Shubert, an employee of Paxton Gate, takes out a Styrofoam platform from underneath the glass counter that showcases an array of colorful beetles, centipedes, spiders and butterflies. She begins to take out small one-inch pins that hold a beautiful, extended eight-legged tarantula.

“There is nothing like watching a tarantula eat their prey,” her eyes lighting up behind her glasses.

Shubert has two tarantulas at home and feeds them crickets. She points across the room to a past pet tarantula, Freddy, that died from old age and whose butt was half eaten by the remaining crickets in the cage. Now Freddy is climbing a small twig in a glass bell container. Lauren still remembers the times they shared, like how he would crawl on her hand, but at least she still gets to see him every time she works.

All the while, a customer gets ringed up for a scorpion in glass display box and a stiff, coiled rattlesnake. The brown and black scaly snake body, not more than a couple feet long, twists like a rollercoaster ride. Both venomous creatures will be used for home decor.

Twenty minutes before closing, Yuko Inatatsuki walks in with two other friends, and like most Paxton Gate patrons, just meanders through the store, her eyes bouncing back and forth looking at the animal heads on the wall, the purple quarks and pyrite through magnifying glasses, and a small personified mouse that plays the cello.

“It’s so interesting and unique what they carry,” she says, fixated on the large spotted giraffe head that welcomes all the customers of Paxton Gate. “I would get the giraffe, but it’s just entertainment to see all the things—I usually don’t get to.”

For most patrons, items displayed in Paxton Gate are as close as they get to nature in the city. Once they walk through the doors, they either get transported to eighth-grade biology class or the zoo.

Aaron Beachnau stands with a friend who is looking for a possible gift. He thinks Paxton Gate is better than the zoo.

“Even at the zoo you can’t sit and really watch the animals because they keep on moving or are hidden,” he says. “You can really see their physique and colors of nature, even when they’re dead.”

It’s possible that when the animals die, that is when they get to show their true colors. Paxton Gate has multiple artists who exhibit their dead creature art in the store. Monique Motyl’s display case is filled with multiple rodent skeletons that are elaborately dressed up in little costumes, such as a geisha kimono or Victorian corset. Jeanie M. displays her mice, which are a mouse as a gothic person in a grave, a bespectacled mouse reading the Examiner or a “mousealope” with antlers. She also leads the taxidermy classes that teaches students how to preserve their own mouse, the same taxidermy class that helped Alis to overcome his fear of small animals.

“It’s a better demise to be turned into art than to be eaten by a snake,” Jeanie says while dropping off her latest piece, a mouse with six legs.

That’s clear as customers of Paxton Gate trade stories about their four or more legged creatures, curiosity for natural sciences and taxidermy are shared between friends and strangers, just like Sir Joseph Paxton, the 19th century naturalist, probably would have wanted it.