Many of the other pieces in the "Dead or Alive" show include death imagery: skulls made out of seeds, dissected owl pellets, and fly carcasses crafted into hovering fairies. It highlights, as the program explains, "the transience of life."

For eco-artists such as Rupp, there is a haunting beauty in bringing the past back, of recreating the dead and gathering them together--in this picture, a pair of moas, a great auk, and a dodo, birds that never would have met while alive--so that those of us in the world of the living can learn from them.