Dogfish Shark Dissection, cont.

WARNING: Not for the squeemish!

Okay, I decided to make this a 'new' blog post, because I can.

I was super-duper excited to help out with this fourth grade project. Turns out Dr. Mark Higgins, DVM and I had met over thirty years ago when we both worked for another vet, Dr. Gross, DVM (yes, real name). He had just finished vet school and I was about ready to start college. 

Small world, huh?

I will also mention that I used (key word here) to be a pretty tough nut when it came to this sort of thing. Sheep eyes and fetal pigs in high school. Castrating rats in college. Watching doctors crack a chest open for open heart surgery (I was standing over the dude's head. The smell of the cauterization was seriously gross.) and watching a human autopsy along with a them cutting open the skull to take the brain out to look for abnormalities, during my medical technology internship.

I thought it would be no biggie. What I didn't take into account, 1) I was hungry, 2) the stench of formaline invades your sinuses and hangs out.  I was forced, forced mind you, to make cookies to get rid of the smell in my head. 

The kids came into the science lab quietly, but that didn't last for long. I had my daughter another girl and three boys. And we got the shark:

And we get one that is curled inward, thus making my life difficult as I tried to straighten it out.
About this time I realized that I can't do my job and take pictures. Hm, this poses a problem.  How to do this without getting shark funk all over my camera. Luckily, Mrs. Eddy came to my rescue and then when Rachel was 'done', she took pictures.

I had the dullest scalpel on the face of the earth. It wouldn't cut butter much less anything else. I think this was where we were pulling the babies out.

Rachel with one of the babies. We had three shark babies, about three yolksacs with no babies attached and one weird looking one that wasn't a baby or just a yolk sack. Hindsight tells me that I should have let the boys dissect that one.

We cut open the stomach, but we didn't find anything. Some of the other tables had fish bones and one small squid. This the point where I almost lose it--the smell of stomach ick.

I cut out the eye and then the lens--it was almost like a perfect little marble. Chopped off the top of the snout to expose the brain-decided that it would be a 'bad idea' to try to dig that sucker out. Broke the jaw to look at the tongue, which is really just a cartilege plate.  Tried to cut open a baby, but it was too tough for my scalpel.

Here are a few more random pictures that my daughter took as she wandered around the room.

And that's it for today.

Later, Peeps!