Here’s that hemisected hen you ordered
January 14, 2019
Ray Wilhite posted this gorgeous image on a Facebook thread, and we’re re-posting it here with his permission.
It’s taken from a poster that Ray co-authored (Roberts et al. 2016). We’re looking here at a coronal cross-section of a hen (age not specified), with anterior to the left. Latex has been injected into the air sacs and lungs, highlighting them in shocking pink.
FInding your way around: the big yellow blobs near the middle are vitelline follicles. Just to their left, the two rounded red triangles that look like networks are the lungs. All the rest of the pink is diverticula and air-sacs: the interclavicle air-sac to the left, the caudal thoracic air-sac right behind the left (lower) lung, and abdominal air-sacs running backwards from the tips of the lungs. The big white oval is a calcified egg.
More from this poster in a subsequent post!
References
- Roberts, John, Ray Wilhite, Gregory Almond, Wallace D Berry, Tami Kelly, Terry Slaten, Laurie McCall and Drury R. Reavill. 2016. Gross and histologic diagnosis of retrograde yolk inhalation in poultry. The American Association of Avian Pathologists, San Antonio, Texas. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.28204.26246
Exploded turtle skulls are cool, but what about exploding the entire turtle? (Not that way.) Folks at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien roll hard. Or did – I assume these exhibits are old. Thankfully no museum studies doofus has insisted they be taken down and replaced with an interactive 3D display on what it feels like to be a sea turtle. Kudos to the current management for keeping the natural history museum filled with natural history.
I didn’t get back far enough from them to photograph all of the labels, mostly because I had like 90 minutes to jet through roughly 13,792 halls of amazing things. But this one is a loggerhead, Caretta caretta. Identifying the others is left as an exercise for the reader.
Or better yet, make your own, if you can procure a dead turtle.
Exploded turtles of the Academy of Natural Sciences
April 29, 2018
Saw this gem back in the herpetology collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and thought, “Someone up and Beauchened a turtle head.” (My inner monologue is a tennis match between an arch language pedant and an unreconstructed hick with a penchant for folksy archaisms.)
What a sweet mount – there should be one of these for every critter in the museum. There should be a Hall of Exploded Skulls, and a Curator of Exploded Skulls. Would that be too much, or not enough? Both hypotheses remain untested. Someone should fix that.
Many, many thanks to Ted Daeschler for showing me all the awesome stuff at the Academy of Natural Sciences – or, if not all, as much as we could cram into two hours.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 