Rat Dissection

On friday we did the rat dissection. The moment in every high schoolers life where the smell of formaldehyde becomes over bearing but curiosity takes over. Or at least for me. Here is a picture of the rat, it was white/yellow in fur colour and had a tail almost 3/4 the length of its body.

Here is it's underbelly where the insision will be made.

You can almost hear the small chitter of it's teeth just by looking at them. It's long whiskers and pink nose are just too adorable!

This rat was a female, you can tell by it's lack of testes. Also look at those long toes!

And the hands, used to help the rat walk and eat.

Cutting through the rat was tough. It has muscles and skin and you can see the layers peeled back. It wasn't easily pinned back either, it put up a real fight.

The rats insides and organs are similar to that of a humans in terms of placement and relative size. It was inteteresting to look at these organs because they were larger than the frogs and more defined with the liver being the largest of them all.

The heart was well protected. Hidden under the diaphram, it was hard to cut through especially the sternum, at points you could even here the poor ladies bones breaking.

 Because of extra time and curiosity my group decided to check out the rats brain. This is the skull which was ridiculously hard to penetrate.

yes we did mush it up a bit, but we tried. Doing this brain surgery gave me a lot of respect for real brain surgens.

And now for easy viewing we pryed the organs out of the rats body to lay them out and label them. You can clearly see the size difference of all the organs now.