That of Nasty Cow Hearts

     In honor of Valentine's Day, we did a heart dissection... Very touching. The heart as we know has an impressive job, though it's design is far from complicated. Instead of using a heart diagram, I will use a picture of my heart labeling quiz, which I received 100 on!

     Now you can imagine how big a cow is right? What if we had a cow heart and say... Dissected it to see the massive areas of study and compared them to other animal hearts? Well we did!

The first thing we did was cut it along the frontal plane, finding it especially difficult to cut through the septum and the thick outer walls.

     Clearly visible is the left atrium, and a bit of all the other chambers. Also visible are lots of veins, the thickness of the wall, the aorta and lots of stringy attachment muscles that allow the heart to beat and expand. This dissection actually came before the quiz, and being able to see this 'blown up' size heart, I was able to access and view the parts easily as a way of studying.

     These are the measurements of our large cow heart.

Aorta: 2.5 cm thick
Left Atrium: 10 cm thick
Left Ventricle: 2.5 cm thick
Right Atrium: 8 cm thick
Right Ventricle: 3.5 cm thick
Outer Wall: 2.5-3 cm thick
Left Atrium: 3.5 cm thick
Left Ventricle: 2 cm thick
Right Atrium: 4 cm thick
Right Ventricle: 0.75 cm thick
Outer Wall: 1.5-2 cm thick

  And this is how our heart stacked up against another group's sheep heart:

Aorta: 1 cm thick

Left Atrium: 3.5 cm thickLeft Ventricle: 2 cm thickRight Atrium: 4 cm thickRight Ventricle: 0.75 cm thickOuter Wall: 1.5-2 cm thick