Ellesiouville has amazing weekend activities for families. Yesterday, the Angry Kid and I dissected a cow's eye. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the completely disassembled eye, but I swear the damn thing came apart like a jigsaw puzzle.
Off to the right of the picture you can see a big lump of sclera with the cornea on the top. In the very front, looking sort of black and slick, is the iris, which came away from the sclera like the peel of an orange. Behind that, the dome-like thing is the lens, sitting on top of a glob of vitreous humor. In the back, in front of the scissors, is the back half of the eyeball. The dirty brown thing hanging over the sclera is the retina, and the pearly blue lining is the tapetum.
It was utterly beautiful. I want to get more of these things from the Chinese market and do it every week.
13 comments:
That's fucking gross.
My son, a second year med student, told me this week that if you take the lens out of a cow's eye you can use it for a magnifying glass. Is this true?
@kmkat - if it's still transparent. The preservative makes them cloudy, so you couldn't see through ours.
You mean udderly beautiful?
Ugh! Once again, I need to remind myself not to read your blog while I'm eating.
So cool!
Awesome! Thanks for sharing that! I' glad somebody's showing kids how cool anatomy can be!
Dissecting the eye was the best part of my anatomy class in nursing school! I did mine AND an extra because it was so fun. Good for you for finding this fun thing for your kid!
The bonding your family enjoyed is *totally worth* the horrific nightmares I'm going to have from reading about it. Up with hands-on science education, and good on you!
The very best part of dissecting a cow's eye is there's always a spare if you mess it up. (The stomach is even better.) And a vitreous humor is better than no humor at all, I say.
It is so cool to hear this. My mother and I used to do weird crap like that when I was a kid. I remember we were in Chinatown and I wanted a pet turtle, you know those little ones for 50 cents, anyway, there was a dead one, and my mom got the dead one as well, and we took it home and dissected it, we also dissected a frog and a dead squirrel I found in the yard. I'm fairly certain there were other things as well, but those stand out in my memory.
You are very strange. Fortunately, I think that is a very good quality.
For a short time I taught biology. Cow eyes are the reason the bookkeeper stopped inventorying my supply orders...:)
Consider dissecting Owl Pellets next time if given a choice.
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