Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Well, it’s time. Ten years and almost 5 months after Mike kicked off our “Things to Make and Do” section with his post on cleaning a pig skull, I am finally getting around to prepping a pig skull of my own. There will be a complete play-by-play coming (er, 13 months later), but for now I want to focus on what is usually the least-pleasant step in prepping a skull: extracting the brain. Aside from the relatively small and often tortuous passages for the cranial nerves, the braincase is a cul-de-sac, with a big glob of tissue (the brain and associated meninges and vessels) only accessible through a relatively small hole at the back of the head (the foramen magnum). Virtually every tutorial and how-to on prepping skulls has some section where the author advises you to basically swirl something around in there, get stuff out the best you can, and prepare to deal with a lot of nastiness along the way. So I had my antennae out for anything that might help, and in the local dollar store I ran across the beauty shown above.

I figured drain rooter = brain rooter, and I was only risking a buck, so I picked one up. It worked a trick: by putting the pig’s snout down the drain, running hot water into the foramen magnum to continually flush out the loose bits, and vigorously exploring the cranial cavity with the brain rooter, I was able to get the whole brain out in about 10 minutes. To be clear, all the tissue came out the foramen magnum; there would be no way to get it to come out the nose without breaking the ethmoid bone and destroying the nasal turbinates. I only put the head snout-down for ease of access. I had a great deal of control, and I could tell pretty well which areas were getting emptied out and which still needed work. All I missed was a small glob of meninges and dural venous sinuses, which came out easily after the first simmer.

Some specific advantages of the drain rooter as a brain extractor:

• backward-pointing teeth to hook out the tissue
• flexible plastic so you can go pretty hard with it without damaging the bone
• super long so you’re not going to find a job too big for it, OR you can cut it to length
• still works for unclogging drains
• dishwasher safe
• dirt cheap

Go have fun.

UPDATE: Turns out pigs have an insane amount of cartilage and mucosa in their nasal cavities, and the brain rooter is pretty good at getting that stuff out, too.