That of Lamb Brains

     The brain is the center of all things. It thinks, feels, speaks, controls movement and involuntary actions like pupil dilation and heartbeat. With this wonderful object controlling my actions and thoughts right now and at every moment, it's worth it to see what it looks like right? This highly condensed graphic shows you regions and the anatomical labels.

The top of the brain as you can see is the cerebrum, with all the squigley wrinkles and it is divided into hemispheres and lobes. To put it simply; this part controls thinking ability, but their are regions within this section that control other thinking areas. Left brain controls the logical reading, talking and intellectual parts while the right is creativity, music and art. Right underneath that is the cerebellum, which controls coordination and the ability to control your muscles, meaning all forms of movement. The Hypothalmus controls desires like hunger, thirst, and mood and the Thalmus recieves all the nerve signals from the spinal cord and sends them up to the cerebrum. Lastly, Optic nerves obviously control the complex system of sight and your eyeballs.

     My group did not dissect little lamby brain at the midsaggital plane, we actually dissected it transversely in order to view some of these key parts as sort of a brain sandwich.

     Hope that wasn't too disturbing for the viewer! Thanks to this brain dissection, we are one step closer to understanding the nervous system and the body as a whole unit.

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