For sale: a smoker's lung, a slice of human head, a piece of hand.

A mail-order service has been set up by a controversial German anatomist offering these and many more human and animal body parts, including preserved slivers of duck and cross-sections of giraffe neck and crocodile jaw.

Gunther von Hagens, inventor of a system known as plastination in which fluids are removed from dead humans or animals and replaced with hardened silicone, allowing body parts to be preserved indefinitely, said his aim was to open access to the samples to a wider audience.

The body parts store, which has been dubbed a supermarket of horrors by opponents, has opened in the German town of Guben, near the Polish border, on the same site as the factory or "plastinarium" where Von Hagens converts dead beings into plastinated objects.

Body part prices range from around €600 (£507) for a cross-section of a fish to €1,500 for a sliver of human head or €15,000 for a section of the entire length of a human body. Smokers' lungs are available for €3,600 and a slice of human hand for as little as €185. The objects will be dispatched by post and can be sent around the world.

Von Hagens, 65, collects his specimens from body donors who sign a contract allowing him to plastinate their bodies after their deaths.

Among the most controversial tableaus of specimens he has produced are a copulating couple, a woman in the eighth month of pregnancy – complete with foetus – and aborted foetuses. An investigation was carried out several years ago into claims that Von Hagens had made use of the bodies of execution victims from China and prisoners from Russia.

Tens of millions of people around the world have visited Von Hagens's touring Body Worlds exhibition. The shop's opening was delayed for two years following severe criticism from body donors and religious groups, which have been at loggerheads with the so-called plastinator for years over his repeated claims that "corpses have no souls".

• This article was amended on 1 June 2010. The original said plastination involves replacing fluids with hardened silicon. This has been corrected.