• Question: favourite animal to disect?

    Asked by moleyymoohem97 to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Sam Tazzyman

      Sam Tazzyman answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I don’t do dissections unfortunately. I remember the last time I did one though, which was at school. We had to dissect a bull’s eye, and find the lens. The scalpels we had to use were so blunt, and the eyes were so tough, that by the time I had finished trying to dissect the eye it was a sort of meat paste, and I couldn’t tell what anything was!

    • Photo: Vera Weisbecker

      Vera Weisbecker answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I like dissecting unusual animals. It is fairly common in my field to dissect something like a rat or a mouse, but I am often lucky and get to look at something really unusual (mind you, these animals are never killed for me, but hit by cars or something like that). My favourite animal would have to be dolphins and seals. I sometimes help some friends to dissect stranded dolphins and seals to find out why they died (sadly, a whole lot of them got entangled in something man-made and drowned). That is always a great experience, because these animals are so different from “normal” land-living mammals and so very few people get to do this work. The downside is that the animals smell undescribably bad!!!!

    • Photo: Steven Daly

      Steven Daly answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I have never dissected an animal! I don’t think I would really find that very interesting really. I have dissected a heart, a liver, and a kidney though. The heart was the most interesting.

    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I dissected some frogs at university. The best (but most gruesome) was where you had to keep it alive, but brain-dead so it didn’t feel pain, then I exposed the heart and measured how strongly it was beating.

    • Photo: Katie Marriott

      Katie Marriott answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I haven’t dissected an animal since I did A-level biology. I dissected a rabbit and a squirrel. The Squirrels were horrible because they had been frozen and preserved with formaldehyde which made them yellow. They really didn’t smell very nice either!! The rabbit wasn’t so bad because my teacher had shot it the day before. Skinning it wasn’t a nice process…

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