Best of Philly Spotlight: Want to Preserve Your Pet … Forever? Call Beth Beverly

Best of Philly 2025 winner for Best Pet Preservation: Beth Beverly of Diamond Tooth Taxidermy / Photograph by Linette Messina

Beth Beverly’s snug Cheltenham workshop smells nothing like what you’d expect of a taxidermy studio. In place of pungent chemical odors, there’s an earthy, warm scent from the incense she lights every morning.

Beverly — wearing a denim apron over a red knit sweater, hair pulled up behind a pretty silk scarf and rooster talon earrings grazing her upper lobe — is seated at a desk in front of a tawny puff. She’s in the middle of transforming a beloved Pomeranian into a lasting memorial for its grieving owner. The tiny dog appears to be sleeping, eyes closed, curled up in a cozy ball.

Beverly is creating a soft mount, carefully sewing the fur using a needle and an antique silver thimble that once belonged to her grandmother.

A magnetic board affixed to the wall next to her table holds a neat row of delicate hooked and pointed silver dental tools, each one essential for the work of positioning and stuffing cotton batting. There are stacks of plastic containers housing bits like glass eyes — a variety hand-painted in Belarus, which she prefers because they’re the best, she says. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, and little combs comprise her arsenal for getting the fur just right.

Before becoming a taxidermist, Beverly did many things. She studied jewelry design, went to circus school, was an aerial hoop performer and a department store window dresser, and spent a decade floating on and off a cruise ship, where she worked as a warranty technician, flame-proofing theater sets and props.

All the while, though, she had a fascination with her natural surroundings, making jewelry and barrettes from feathers, dried flowers, shells, and snake skins. “I would notice dead birds on the sidewalk, and I hated seeing how people would step over them — I felt compelled to preserve them somehow, because it seemed so undignified.”

Beverly’s first foray into preserving those birds came thanks to a beginner taxidermy book from the ’70s, filled with outdated techniques. Eventually, though, she realized she’d never improve unless she went to school, so she enrolled in a formal taxidermy program in the Poconos, where she learned more modern approaches. Her instructor cautioned her with one piece of advice she remembers clearly: Don’t do pets.

“I think what he was trying to say,” she says, “is that if some guy brings you a deer … he doesn’t know that deer, so as long as you have it anatomically correct, it looks good. But someone brings me their dog, this is the animal that they woke up with every day. The pressure to get the face right, the details — the bar is so much higher.”

Luckily for her clients, though, she didn’t heed the instructor’s advice, and nowadays the bulk of Beverly’s business — Diamond Tooth Taxidermy — is immortalizing pets.

Clipped to the wall above her desk are dozens of photos and a hand-drawn sketch of the Pomeranian, with meticulous measurements recorded. She uses these visuals to re-create the animal to its exact size and shape. While many taxidermists use premade foam forms, Beverly is one of the few specializing in pets, so she “basically re-creates the whole skeleton,” custom-making each piece using a wire armature for structure and building the animal’s body with various thicknesses of cotton batting.

The whole experience can be emotionally taxing for both her and her clients. To best navigate the more sensitive moments, she took a certification course for being an end-of-life doula — something geared toward humans — “as a way to try and rise to the occasion a little better,” she says.

For Beverly, it feels like all her various jobs brought her to this place. “It’s nice to feel like this weird skill set, this thing that I was really into doing 25 years ago — I’m actually being of service now,” she says. “It feels so rewarding.”

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Published as “Picture This: Fur Keeps” in the August 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.