Why dissect a fetal pig

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Carolina's Perfect Solution specimens are a safe, non-toxic alternative to Formalin. Carolina's innovative, proprietary tissue fixative produces superior specimens with life-like tissue texture and color. Carolina provides owl pellet products that are heat sterilized and easy to use for students of all ages. Excellent for hands-on, inquiry-based learning. For over 80 years, Carolina has provided superior non-mammal specimens that engage students in hands-on dissecting experiments.

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We have interdisciplinary activities and tips to help. This brief guide will provide you with the information you need to make a number of solutions commonly used in educational laboratories. In this activity, students engage in a game of beanbag toss—but instead of merely keeping score, they explore statistical concepts such as mean, median, mode, and range.

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Get general information, care guides, and product information here. Brush up on the latest instructional strategies and pedagogy with information from our teaching partners, instructional designers, and academic consultants. Feeling the pinch from the current economy? Carolina understands. Pigs are excellent and engaging specimens for studying mammalian anatomy. They exhibit hair, a muscular diaphragm, a 4-chambered heart, and mammary glands.

Middle school students can use preserved pigs to begin their exploration of human body systems and structure and function. Advanced high school biology or anatomy and physiology students can use pig anatomy as an explanatory model for human anatomy, both internally and externally. Remember, pig heart valves have for years been an option for human heart valve transplants.

Preserved pigs are also perfect specimens for modeling fetal development. The pig specimen demonstrates fetal circulation and umbilical vessels. For students studying forensic science, preserved pigs are perfect tools for teaching the protocols pathologists follow during an autopsy.

The placement of incisions changes when compared to standard dissection, allowing students to examine internal organs separately or as a system. As time permits, students can take measurements of organs and organ systems, dissect select organs, and even make microscope slides of tissue samples from their specimens for comparison to prepared pathology slides. Preserved pigs provide a complete and comprehensive hands-on tool for students to practice developing explanations and models, analyzing data, and arguing from evidence.

Below is a brief survey of the internal and external anatomy of the pig. Click on any of the photographs to view enlargements. Links to high-resolution, unlabeled photographs are also provided for many of the photographs.

Obtain a fetal pig and identify the structures listed in figure 1. Use figures 1—4 below to identify its sex. Use your pig and also a pig of the opposite sex to identify the structures in the photographs below.

Tie one front leg of the animal with a string that passes underneath the dissecting pan to the other leg. Repeat this with the back leg. Insert one blade of scissors through the body wall on one side of the umbilical cord and cut posteriorly to the base of the leg as shown in figure 6.

Continue cutting from the anterior end of this cut so that it resembles an upside-down U. Your finished cut will be anterior to the navel and along each side of the navel. The flap of body wall that contains the navel can be folded posteriorly to reveal the internal organs of the abdomen.

Extend a single cut along the midline of the ventral surface of the animal to about 2 cm. Cut completely through the body wall in the abdominal area but keep the cut shallow in the neck region. A cut is made on the side of the animal from the point just posterior to the diaphragm dorsally. A similar cut is made on the other side.

These two cuts will enable you to spread open the abdominal cavity. Use a scalpel to cut the sides of the mouth so that the bottom jaw can be opened for easier viewing see figure You will need to cut through the musculature and the joint that holds the lower jaw to the skull. Open the jaw wide enough so that the glottis and epiglottis are exposed.

The epiglottis projects up through the soft palate into a region called the nasopharynx. The hard palate and soft palate separate the nasal and oral cavities. When breathing, air passes through the nasal passages to the pharynx. The pharynx is the space in the posterior portion of the mouth that both food and air pass through.

From the pharynx, it passes through the glottis to the trachea. Carefully, peel the skin away from the incision in the neck region using a blunt probe a needle or the point of scissors will do if a blunt probe is not available. Use the probe to peel away muscle tissue until the thymus gland on each side of the trachea is exposed. Use a probe to separate the two lobes of the thymus gland and to further separate the musculature over the trachea. The thyroid gland is darker and lies between the posterior ends of the two lobes of the thymus gland.

Figure The surrounding tissues have been separated to reveal the thyroid gland. Continue separating the tissue with a probe until the trachea and esophagus are exposed. The esophagus is dorsal to the trachea.

The large hard structure attached to the trachea is the larynx. It contains the vocal chords. In the photograph below, the heart and blood vessels of the neck region have been removed so that the trachea can be seen more clearly. You should not remove these structures yet because you will need to identify the blood vessels later in the dissection. Observe how the diaphragm attaches to the body wall and separates the abdominal cavity from the lung pleural and heart pericardial cavities figure 16 and 18 below.

Contraction of the diaphragm forces air into the lungs. You have already seen the nasopharynx, hard palate, soft palate, epiglottis, glottis, trachea, and larynx. Follow the trachea to where it branches into two bronchi and observe that each bronchus leads to a lung. The left lung contains three lobes and the right lung contains four. Each lung is located in a body cavity called a pleural cavity. You have already seen how the esophagus leads from the pharynx through the neck region.

Using a probe, trace follow the esophagus to the stomach. Identify the small intestine and large intestine. Find the posterior part of the large intestine called the rectum and observe that it leads to the anus. Locate the cecum , a blind pouch where the small intestine joins the large intestine. Fetal pigs are relatively inexpensive. Dissection is a hands-on, investigatory kind of activity for students. Historically, dissection has been the principle tool of investigation for anatomists 2.

Dissection impresses on students the normal variation that is present in the natural world. No two fetal pigs, even though they are perfectly normal, will look exactly the same. In fact, to do well on practicals, students MUST looks at several examples of each structure in different animals.